


Never met anyone I could laugh with

by thehobbem



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Ballet Dancer Katsuki Yuuri, Fluff, Humor, Librarian Victor Nikiforov, M/M, Romantic Comedy, While You Were Sleeping AU, and the katsukis are irresistible, cw: mention of violence, very small and briefly and vaguely, victor is very very lonely ya'll, yuuri is even more so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:26:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22322533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehobbem/pseuds/thehobbem
Summary: "If you could read all that so ravenously, wouldn't you also have opinions, thoughts, ideas circling ‘round your head that wouldn't let you be until you talked them out of your system?Victor did. Victor had for years, swallowing it all down because there was no one to listen to it. And there she was, waltzing into his library and dangling the temptation of a like-minded companion in front of him every Friday, before whisking it away along with the book of the week. A literature companion, at least. He'd love acompanioncompanion, but that wouldn't be Miss Katsuki, with his being very, very gay; but that was even harder to come by, so a friend to talk to would be more than enough at this point. Someone with similar opinions about books, and people, and the world as a whole. Someone to laugh with."
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri's Family & Victor Nikiforov, Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Comments: 210
Kudos: 404
Collections: Chihohohoko 2020: Victor’s 30th birthday exchange





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ayabai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ayabai/gifts).



> Happy new year, aya! XD ♥

**NORTHERN LIGHTS, PULLMAN, P.**

**DUE DATE:** January 13, 2020

"Here you are. Have a nice weekend," said Victor, handing the book to the boy. With a smile, the boy said "thanks!" and skipped away. 

_His Dark Materials, huh?_ Victor thought as the boy left the library. _Nice choice. Hope his family isn’t too religious._

Another Friday regular off today’s list. Friday was the most movement the library saw during the week; not everyone had time to pick up a book during the week, what with school and/or work, but Friday usually saw an uptick in borrowing.

Victor had a few personal favorite regulars: there was Elderly Woman With The Really Long Braid, who always got a couple of bodice rippers, and Ukrainian Man With The Eternally Runny Nose who was working his way through the entire Alexandre Dumas bibliography; there was Intimidating Japanese Woman With The Best Literary Taste, who took home a wildly different book almost every Friday, and also Weird Shoes-In-Hand Lady, who always had a different pair of shoes in her hands while wearing another, and asked Victor every week if they had Sophie Kinsella’s _Confessions of a Shopaholic._ He invariably said ‘yes’, to which she would always nod and then silently leave, sans _Confessions of a Shopaholic._ And of course, Boy Whose School Uniform Was Filthy At The End Of Every Single Friday. He’d been coming to the library for a year now, and if asked, Victor would readily admit that one of the best parts of his job was getting to see children’s literary tastes expand and develop. 

Eyes falling on the calendar on his desk, Victor would also readily admit that one of the _worst_ parts of his job was having to say yes to Yakov. He’d thought this year he’d get the holidays off, for once; he’d paid his dues last year, and most of this year as well.

_“Vitya, I can’t ask Mila to work on the 24th, she has plans with her fiancée. Sara also has plans with her fiancée—”_

_“They’re engaged to each other!”_

_“—and Gosha is going to meet Anya’s parents.“_

_Taking his hot dog, Victor thanked the vendor before scoffing at Yakov. “Assuming they don’t break up again. C’mon, Yakov, I worked on the 24th last year!”_

_Yakov rubbed his eyes. “I know, Vitya. You know I’d stay, but I already bought the plane tickets.”_

_“Yeah, I know,” Victor mumbled. He couldn’t ask Yakov to stay, not when that trip had so much at stake. For both of them, really. Without another word he took a giant bite of his lunch; he still had 30 minutes left of his lunch hour, but if he wanted to enjoy a bit of the rare December sun, he should eat fast._

_“You’re the only one available. Besides,” Yakov added, and his eyes dropped to his falafel wrap, suddenly deeply taken with its construction, “you’re the only one who… you know.”_

_“Right,” said Victor bitterly, and the next bite of his hot dog went down like a ton of rocks. “The only one without a family.”_

Sighing, Victor looked at the clock: 5:45 PM. Only 15 minutes more before he could close the library, drop by the Turkish café for some dinner, and head home for another night of Netflix and no one to chill with. 

When the last couple of patrons left Victor roamed around, picking up a book here, putting a chair back into place there, and turning off the computers. The shift got really lonely at the end of the afternoon, when Georgi left at 4 PM and Victor was the only librarian left. Then again, Georgi didn’t usually make for entertaining company, with his never ending conversations about existentialism and nihilism.

Suddenly, hurried steps burst into the library with an "oh, _thank God,_ you're still open", and Victor looked up: Intimidating Japanese Woman. He smiled at her and gestured at the endless shelves in a silent "help yourself".

"I'm sorry, I'll be super fast," she mumbled as she walked past, and Victor made some non-committal noise in response. It really didn't matter whether he left the library at 6 PM sharp, or 6:05, or 6:10, or later. It wasn't like he had anything to go back home to. 

With an equal parts annoyed and ashamed "I can never figure out that check-out station" as she returned Dicken’s _Bleak House_ , she placed Murakami's _1Q84_ on the counter.

 _Great choice, fantastical realism at its finest_ , he thought to himself. The only thing he actually said, however, was his usual “Here you are. Have a nice weekend”. Not for nothing, Intimidating Japanese Woman (“Katsuki”, he reminded himself with a glance at her name on the computer) had really earned the "Intimidating" bit: the piercings on the left ear told him she was cool, and the dark roots showing up beneath the blonde hair told him she most likely didn't care what you thought about her hair — but her impassive face and her slightly abrupt demeanor hinted at places to go and things to do, and how she had neither the time nor the inclination to chit chat with Random, Albeit Extremely Handsome and Charming, Librarian.

A shame, really. He’d like nothing more than to talk with her. She had to be one of the patrons with the most interesting, diverse taste in books to set foot in this library since Victor had started working here. As she closed the double doors behind her and left the building, he looked at the computer again, examining the list of books she’d borrowed the past couple of months: before _Bleak House_ she’d taken Terry Pratchett’s _Snuff,_ Junichiro Tanizaki’s _Some Prefer Nettles,_ David Sedaris’ _Me Talk Pretty One Day,_ and Eça de Queirós’ _Cousin Bazilio._ Quietly, Victor had jotted down _Me Talk Pretty One Day_ on his To Read list. He wasn’t a big comedy reader, but Intimidating Japane— _Miss Katsuki_ had a more than respectable reading list for him to take that leap of faith.

Imagine actually talking about all of them with her. From _Harry Potter_ to _Anna Karenina,_ she seemed to be able to devour it all. And if you could read all that so ravenously, wouldn't you also have opinions, thoughts, ideas circling ‘round your head that wouldn't let you be until you talked them out of your system?

Victor did. Victor had for years, swallowing it all down because there was no one to listen to it. And there she was, waltzing into his library and dangling the temptation of a like-minded companion in front of him every Friday, before whisking it away along with the book of the week. A literature companion, at least. He'd love a _companion_ companion, but that wouldn't be Miss Katsuki, with his being very, very gay; but that was even harder to come by, so a friend to talk to would be more than enough at this point. Someone with similar opinions about books, and people, and the world as a whole. Someone to laugh with. 

A glance at the clock as he tidied up a small pile of books: 6 PM. Scarf around his neck, coat on, computers off, time to— 

"Get off of me!"

Raising his eyes towards the nearest window, Victor found Miss Katsuki outside cursing like a sailor, pulling her bag by the handles while a man pulled it just as hard by the other end. Another man came at her from behind, yielding a plank of wood.

Victor ran.

He was out the doors and round the corner of the building in five seconds, yelling "hey, leave her alone!" before he could even see them — but by the time he got there, all that waited for him was the sight of the two men running away and the woman fallen on the ground, the contents of her bag spread out in the snow. He threw himself on his knees by her side, patting her face as firmly as he dared.

“Hey, hey! Katsuki, are you okay?” What was her name, she had a _name._ Mary? Marie? “Mary. Mary, can you hear me?”

Nothing. Fuck, she was out cold.

Victor pulled his cell phone out and dialed 911.

* * *

By the time the back doors of the ambulance opened in front of the hospital, Miss Katsuki had still not woken up, nor had Victor been able to answer many other questions beyond her name. The only thing he’d managed to contribute was dumping her things back into her bag and giving it to one of the paramedics.

As they rushed her in, he followed the stretcher carrying Katsuki; no one paid Victor any mind or seemed to have any questions for him, however, and he was soon left behind in the hallway when she was taken into a room; unsure of where to go or who to talk to, he took a seat in one of the uncomfortable benches. Every time a nurse or a doctor exited the room he stood up, and was ignored just as before.

Half an hour went by without anyone dignifying him with an update. And sure, perhaps he wasn't owed one, seeing he wasn't family, but he _was_ the only one there who knew her somewhat, and the one who found her. Surely that counted for something?

Besides, he might not _know_ know her, but he… knew her. He knew how she always tied her hair back with a bandanna and was not great with technology (if recurrent difficulties with the automated check out station were anything to go by, and they usually were), knew she smoked because she always smelled like it, and that she had a quietly kind smile. He also knew the books she read, which meant he knew she was an intelligent person with a sharp sense of humor. That she was the one friend he'd like to have. 

He couldn't go home and leave her now. He was here with her.

When another half hour had passed and Victor's phone battery was down to a desperate 12%, a nurse came to ask him a few questions, and Victor stood up in relief. He offered the little information he’d already given the paramedics — what he'd seen happen, what the mugger had hit her with, and what precautions he'd taken upon finding her. The nurse nodded, humming and furiously writing all of it on a pad. Victor's eyes ping ponged between the pad and the nurse's name tag ("Ji Guang Hong, R.N."); if asked, he would at least be able to pinpoint which professional he'd talked to.

“And how is she?” Victor finally asked, as the silence stretched on.

The answer was what Victor had dreaded: a sympathetic smile and a "Sorry. Family only."

"But I'm with her," he said hopefully.

Nurse Guang Hong shook his head. "I'm sorry, we can only give out information to the family at this point."

With that, the nurse went away and Victor sighed, sagging back on the bench. Great, now what? How was he supposed to get news of Miss Katsuki? _Mary_ Katsuki, he added. Or perhaps Marie. Maria? 

"Mari Katsuki? Room 12."

His head snapped up: half a dozen people came sprinting down the hall with three little girls in tow. In the blink of an eye, they passed by him and hurried into room 12. Miss Katsuki’s room _(_ _Mari_ Katsuki, so that was it). The door was firmly shut after the last of the group walked in. 

Victor stared at it for the next twenty minutes. He had no idea how long they'd take in there, but if he wanted any sort of news, this was his only chance.

Eventually, nurse Guang Hong came out and on seeing Victor, he beamed and beckoned him excitedly.

"Mr. Nikiforov, come! Let me introduce you to them!"

Oh. The nurse had mentioned him! The minute he walked into the room, the buzz of voices in the room died, and eight pairs of eyes turned his way. 

"Mr. and Mrs. Katsuki, this is the man who saved her life! Mr. Nikiforov, these are Miss Katsuki's parents."

Mrs. Katsuki, an older lady with glasses, covered her mouth, eyes glittering with tears, while her husband smiled at him and offered his hand. When Victor shook it, the man covered his hand with both of his.

"How can we ever thank you?"

His wife nodded, her hands going from her mouth to clutch her heart. "If you hadn’t been there—"

A tall, slim woman in the back nodded along, while a brown-haired girl around Victor's age whispered something to the man next to her; the three little girls stared at him in awe. This was… nice, but also too much, he had no idea how to respond. He wasn't a hero or anything, he'd just done the decent thing, and all he wanted was some news and to know Mari Katsuki wasn't going to die. His eyes went to her, lying on the bed: other than being paler than usual, she looked as if she were asleep.

"The doctor says she would've died had she been left out there for another five minutes," said the tall woman, as if reading his thoughts. "As it is, she's just in a coma, but she does have brain activity."

'Just' would never be Victor's choice of word to go with 'coma', but given the alternative, perhaps it wasn't entirely out of place.

“My cousin was out in the snow for too long, and he lost a toe,” said the other guy, a man of stocky build and the squarest jaw line Victor had ever se— well, no, that was not true, Yakov was someone that existed. But the man was a close second. 

“Yeah, but he wasn’t in a coma,” the girl next to him pointed out. “So Mari’s got it worse.”

“It’s not a competition, I’m just saying!”

“Well, I’m glad to hear she’s okay,” Victor interposed gently. If only he had the courage to ask them to give him an update when she woke up. Should he? He shouldn’t. It’d be too much, right? But he _did_ save her life, so maybe he could ask. Asking never hurt anyone. They probably wouldn’t min—

“But you haven’t heard the best part yet,” said the nurse, smiling from ear to ear, and his next words came out in an excited, conspiratory whisper, “he’s her boyfriend!”

Silence.

Eight pairs of wide eyes stared at him, in the quickest déjà vu of his life.

Victor stared at the nurse.

Nurse Guang Hong smiled beatifically from one face to another.

“What?” Victor whispered.

“What do you _mean_ boyfriend?!” said the tall woman, looking not at Victor or the nurse, but rather at Mari herself. “You couldn’t even tell us you have a _boyfriend?!”_ she asked the unconscious Mari, slapping her on the arm.

“She’s always so busy, so you know,” said the brown-haired girl, shrugging.

“She lives and works with her parents, she could make the time to tell them!”

Mr. Katsuki shook his head. “Maybe she didn’t want to bring home a—” a word Victor did not understand, and assumed it was Japanese. God only knew what it meant.

He tried to intervene. “No, listen, I think there’s been a mis—”

The embrace he was suddenly caught in quashed whatever else he had to say: Mrs. Katsuki barely reached his neck, but somehow had the strength of ten men in her hug.

“We can’t believe she has a _boyfriend!_ Oh, I’m so happy!” she said, almost crushing him. She took a step back and contemplated him with a bright smile that squeezed all air out of his lungs — it was so bright, so… encompassing. It conveyed Victor was welcome. To what, exactly, was not really a question; welcome to wherever she was.

“Mari always keeps things to herself,” she said, folding her hands on her chest again, “but I always hoped she’d find a nice young man, and she found you!”

“You don’t know how much this means to us,” said Mr. Katsuki, shaking his hand again with fervor. “Mari never says a word about where she goes or who she sees. We ask her about her day and all she says is ‘Nothing special’.”

“We don’t even know if she has other friends,” said the tall woman, flipping her long hair over her shoulder. “And by the way, I’m Minako,” she said extending her hand. 

Victor took it on auto-pilot. “Victor.”

“I’m Mari’s godmother,” she added. By his side, Mr. Katsuki shook his head.

“That’s not true, we’re not Christians,” he said, with a gentle smile at Victor.

Minako waved the objection away. “A technicality. I’m her godmother, and Yuuri’s, for all intents and purposes.”

“I’m Yuuko!” said the brown-haired girl, smiling at him. “Yuuri’s best friend!”

Victor looked hesitantly at the man next to her. “Are… you Yuuri?”

The man’s laughter probably boomed throughout the entire hospital. “No no no, I’m Takeshi Nishigori!” He pointed at Yuuko and grinned. “I’m her husband!”

Behind him, the three little girls — probably their children, then, they looked like him — started taking pictures.

“Have you never seen a picture of Yuuri?” Yuuko asked, her furrown knitting.

“No, not really. Listen, this is all a mist—”

“Oh, of course,” said Yuuko, rolling her eyes briefly. “Mari doesn’t have social media. Ugh, she’s the worst.”

“She has Twitter,” her husband reminded her.

“Only to follow that boy band she likes, she doesn’t post anything.”

“Good, she shouldn’t,” said Minako, taking her phone out of her pocket. “That thing is a cesspit. Do you have Facebook?” she asked Victor abruptly.

“I do, but I barely use it, so I don’t know if…? But no, look, I—”

“It’s not a _complete_ cesspit,” said Takeshi. “You can follow some really funny people.”

“Did anyone call Yuuri, by the way?” asked Yuuko. One of the girls showed her a cell phone.

“We sent him a message from your phone!”

“Like Mark Hamill,” Takeshi went on.

“Who?” Minako asked.

“The guy from _Star Wars!”_

“The tall one with the nose?”

“No, that’s Kylo Ren.”

“Adam Driver,” Yuuko supplied helpfully. And to Victor: “I would climb him like a tree.”

“He was on Colbert the other day.” Mrs. Katsuki added. 

Minako frowned in an effort of memory. “Is he the handsome blonde one, with the beard?”

“That’s Ewan McGregor,” Victor replied before he could stop himself.

“Exactly, thank you!” said Takeshi. “No, I mean the _original_ guy from _Star Wars._ ”

Something tugged at Victor’s coat, and he looked down: it was one of the girls — were they triplets? They looked _identical._

“Do you like _Star Wars?”_ she asked.

“I uhh… I liked Ewan McGregor in it,” he said carefully.

“Oh, he was great in _Moulin Rouge,”_ said Minako.

_You’re telling me and my big gay crush._

Mrs. Katsuki smiled at him, and once again, Victor couldn’t stop staring at her. How could one simple smile irradiate so much sheer kindness?!

"Victor, thank you so much for being with my daughter,” she said, full of a quiet certainty. “She’s sacrificed so much just to help us, her whole life revolves around the inn, you know. We just wanted her to find someone. Someone for _her,_ if you know what I mean."

"I… I do. Yeah," he said slowly, his heart dropping.

"We've held her back long enough," said Mr. Katsuki with a sad shake of his head. "I'm glad to know we haven't stopped her from finding her own happiness."

Whatever was left of Victor's heart at this point sunk so completely it'd take years of archeological work to finds its remnants. Muttering an excuse about work, he quickly said his goodbyes and left the room as fast as he could.

The walk from the hospital to his apartment building should’ve taken twenty minutes on foot; it took ten, with the speed Victor tried to run away from the warmth of Mrs. Katsuki’s smile and the truth he hadn’t been able to tell.

* * *

Victor got up the fifth time in the last hour, this time for a glass of water. Sleep just wouldn’t cooperate tonight, regardless of how tired he was or how early he had to wake up tomorrow. Nothing had worked so far, not the warm glass of milk, nor the chamomile tea, or reading, watching TV — all he’d managed to do was go to the bathroom twice already for all the liquid, and not register anything he’d read or watched.

The problem, of course, was not sleep.

Putting down the glass with a sigh, Victor headed back to his bedroom and opened his closet, getting out a pair of jeans and his coat. As if he didn’t know what would bring him some semblance of peace of mind.

* * *

The hospital was quiet this late at night, and he went into Mari’s bedroom after a nod from the nurse confirmed he could.

Inside, Mari looked unchanged from this evening; just a woman peacefully sleeping, one might say. Nothing to indicate she’d been dangerously close to death.

“Hey,” he whispered.

Silently, he pulled up a chair from the corner and brought it next to the bed. He stared at her for some time, twisting his gloves in his hands until they were unrecognizable as such.

“So,” he started, and gave a half smile, “You’re probably thinking ‘what’s the Handsome Library Guy doing here?’, right? Yeah, same, to be honest. But um… your whole family thinks we’re dating? That’s gotta be weird for you. So… I don’t know, I thought we could talk.”

No answer. He took a deep breath.

“My name’s Victor Nikiforov. I’m a librarian — but you know that — and I’m 27. Gonna be 28 in a couple of days, actually. And I’m… I’m sorry, I didn’t _mean_ for them to think we’re dating! I’m not sure where the nurse got that idea, but I promise you I didn’t say that! And um, I have no idea what to do, your mom was so nice? Everyone was so nice, and I— I don’t know. I didn’t have the heart. They were so _relieved.”_ With a small laugh, he added, “I don’t know what kind of life you’ve been living, young lady, but they really want you to have a relationship! Your parents seemed really sad, and worried about you.”

No answer again, as expected. He’d had a tiny spark of hope, if he was being honest. In movies, when a loved one talks to someone in a coma, that someone usually wakes up; but then, Victor wasn’t a loved one. Not Mari’s, nor anyone’s.

“It’s nice to have people worried about you. I don’t really know what that’s like — at least, not lately. I remember it, of course. I remember everything, every single word my mom ever said to me, every smile, every… but it’s not the same. And it’s all gone now.”

He rubbed his eyes. God, he must sound so stupid. “But I’m whining, I’m sorry. I can’t complain, really! I have a good job, an apartment — and it’s mine, so that’s a plus. And I don’t have to put up with someone else’s mess, like clothes on the chair or unwashed dishes… I’m not complaining. It’s just… well, it’s a bit… lonely. You know?” He huffed a dry laugh, “Have you ever felt so lonely you chose to spend the night confusing someone in a coma? Yeah. Because even if it’s _your_ apartment, it still feels empty when there’s no one else there. No one to smile with you. I miss that. And your mom… she actually smiled at me. Not… not at the librarian, or the guy buying coffee, when you smile and say ‘have a nice day’ — she smiled at _me._ Victor.” He opened his hands. “I couldn’t tell her. I’m so sorry.”

The beep of the machine had remained unaltered throughout his entire monologue, as it was bound to. Victor was so stupid, why would he even think Mari Katsuki was _his_ sleeping beauty for him to wake?

He shifted on the chair and rested his head against the wall behind him, closing his eyes for a second. At least he’d confessed to someone.

* * *

“Victor!”

His eyes snapped open immediately: the room was immersed in sunlight, and on the other side of the bed, the Katsukis and Co. stared at him.

Yuuko’s eyes were the size of saucers. “Did you stay here all night?”

Victor blinked a few times, trying to adjust to the light. “Um… yes?” He yawned.

“Awww,” said Takeshi. Minako nodded, seemingly impressed. 

“Good boyfriend,” and she looked at Mari. “I approve.”

Mrs. Katsuki took Victor’s hands in hers — tiny hands that, despite a few calluses here and there, were soft and warm.

“You should come over tonight, we’re having Christmas dinner and we want the whole family there. That includes you, Vicchan.”

 _Vicchan._ He didn’t need to speak Japanese to recognize an endearment. He hadn’t heard one for so long.

“Thank you, Mrs. Katsuki, but I really don’t think—”

“Yuuri’s gonna be there!” said one of the triplets, and the other two nodded sagely. “You have to meet him.”

“No, I— I don’t want to intrude.”

Mr. Katsuki clicked his tongue. It would’ve sounded annoyed, if his face weren’t the very picture of good humor. “Nonsense, Vicchan, you’re part of the family now! Here,” he took out his wallet and gave him a card. It had Japanese characters at the top, with the name ‘Yu-topia Inn’ underneath it. The address wasn’t far, just a few subway stations away from Victor’s house.

“And here,” Mr. Katsuki continued, getting his own phone out of his pocket, “put your number here so we can call you later!”

Victor opened his mouth to protest, and then looked over at Mrs. Katsuki. She smiled and nodded encouragingly.

He closed his mouth and, without another word, inserted his number in Mr. Katsuki’s contacts.

* * *

“Here, Minako, where’s your glass?” asked Takeshi, opening the wine bottle.

Minako put up a hand. “I don’t drink anymore.”

The entire room stared at her. She grinned.

“I don’t drink any less, either!” 

Takeshi filled her glass among the general laughter, Victor’s included. God, when had the last time he’d laughed this much even been?!

As he watched his own glass be filled, a part of his brain (an admittedly small part of it) yelled that this was insane. Insane. What was he doing here?! All he had to do was not come, and never visit Mari at the hospital again. Both extremely easy to do. Laughably so, in fact. So why was he here?

The answer was in that affectionate smile directed at him from the other side of the room, courtesy of Mrs. Katsuki. It was Christmas, who was he to ruin her Christmas like that? Victor Nikiforov was many things, but never a Grinch! He could come clean tomorrow. Or the day after. Tomorrow was also Christmas, so he couldn’t ruin tomorrow, either. But the day after, for sure. He’d come clean then.

“Guys, everyone together over there!” said Yuuko, waving them all towards the window. While the Katsukis had not put up a Christmas tree — not exactly a Japanese custom, as far as he could gather — they had gone as far as to have white twinkle lights outside and inside all around the window in the living room, and an enormous arrangement of red Poinsettias on the table. 

Just as Victor had settled behind the Katsukis and arranged his picture smile, he heard the front door open.

“I sure hope you’re not taking pictures without me,” said an unknown voice as the sound of steps came closer.

“It’s Yuuri!” the triplets exclaimed in unison, and ran away from the group picture just as Yuuko tapped the button. She sighed and put her phone back in her pocket.

The owner of the voice came into the living room with one of the triplets in his arms, the other two clinging to each of his legs, and a bright smile. “Sorry I missed dinner, I w— oh.” He stopped once his eyes landed on Victor, his lips parted in surprise as he took the new, unexpected presence in. So that was the mysterious, much-talked about Yuuri, Mari’s younger brother.

Mari’s _unbelievably attractive_ younger brother, if Victor were more specific, because dear God who’d even given that woman permission to have this gorgeous of a brother?! With the cutest upturned nose, jet black hair sticking out everywhere from the beanie still in his other hand, and hazel brown eyes that sparkled like gold under the twinkle lights; Victor could stare at that face for hours.

He was already, in fact, as he saw Yuuri blush and look at his dad. “Um...”

Mr. Katsuki simply nodded. “That’s Victor!”

Yuuri looked at Victor and then back at his dad, his face pure confusion. Mrs. Katsuki put a hand on Victor’s shoulder.

“Vicchan, this is Yuuri. Yuuri, my dear, this is Mari’s boyfriend, Victor.”

“Mari’s _boyfriend?!”_ he echoed, his surprise clear on his face.

“Yes, they met at the library!” said one of the triplets — a lie Victor had fed them earlier tonight, when pressed for the story of how he’d met Mari. He’d gone with the truth.

“Oh, I see. Well, um, nice to meet you!” he said, finally looking back at Victor and shaking his hand. Victor mumbled something similar in return, his heart sinking. The sheer look of bafflement in Yuuri’s eyes was a reflection of that first moment of shock when nurse Guang Hong had said _“he’s her boyfriend!”._ A mirror image of how Victor had lied his way into affection that wasn’t his to take.

The rest of the night went by in a blur, with Victor laughing and smiling in the right places, but otherwise not contributing much to the conversation. _Talk too much and you’ll slip, and now is definitely not the time._ The fact that Yuuri every now and then shot him a confused look didn’t help matters much — or the fact that Victor would love to look back at Yuuri some more, but under very different circumstances. At some point, he could’ve sworn he’d heard Yuuri whisper “Mari’s boyfriend, are you _sure?”_ to which Yuuko answered, “yes, he saved her life!”

Offering to do the dishes was the only way he found to buy him time away from Yuuri’s puzzled eyes, but it also made Mrs. Katsuki extremely agitated and flustered. In the end he won her out, but only after promising her not to bother with the pans and the baking sheets. He broke his word and washed everything anyway.

When the triplets started yawning and falling asleep one by one, and Yuuko mentioned it was way past their bedtime, Victor took that as his cue: “Yes, I should be going too.”

Mrs. Katsuki looked immediately distraught. “Oh no, are you sure, Vicchan? You should eat some more, we still have— Toshiya, go get the rest of the cheesecake.”

“No no no,” said Victor, laughing, “I’m fine, Mrs. Katsuki, thank you, I really am! But I should go, got a long day tomorrow!”

“Don’t tell me you’re working on the 25th,” said Minako, horrified.

“No, just… plans with my uncle,” he said vaguely. His somber, silent birthday lunch with Yakov, to be precise. More importantly, he had plans to stay away from this family and stop lying, for a change.

Mrs. Katsuki looked relieved. “Good, you shouldn’t be alone during the holidays, Vicchan,” she said kindly, and he almost laughed. One day of not being alone wouldn’t make much of a difference, considering all the rest of the year — but she couldn’t know that. And he was pretty sure that, if she did, her heart would break.

Therefore, he nodded his assent and winked at her. “Will do, Mrs. Katsuki.”

She turned to her son. “Yuuri, take him to the station, he can’t go by himself.”

“No, that’s not necess—”

“Sure thing,” Yuuri said, already getting up.

“No, Yuuri, you really don’t have to,” said Victor desperately. Having to stretch his lies to Mari’s brother — the one person most likely to know more about Mari’s personal lives than her parents — was the last thing Victor needed tonight.

“Victor, please, this is Brooklyn,” said Yuuri, unperturbed, wrapping a blue scarf around his neck and putting his windbreaker back on. Victor didn’t know what to answer to that, half because Yuuri was right, and half because that was the first thing he’d actually said _to_ Victor the entire night.

With a smile, Yuuri put on his beanie and grabbed Victor’s coat and scarf from the hook by the door. “Let’s?”

* * *

The first couple of minutes of their walk were wrapped in silence — the kind between two people who have not exchanged two words before and somehow find themselves alone together. The kind that pricked at the edges, just enough to be inconvenient, not enough to make you want to do something about it. But Victor was still grateful for it: just another couple of minutes more, and he’d be free from having to lie to yet another person.

“So. At the library, then?” asked Yuuri.

Victor swallowed a sigh: it was not to be, it seemed.

“Yeah. I work there, and she comes in a lot,” he said. So far, nothing but the truth.

“Yeah, she’s the best,” said Yuuri in a low voice. Victor didn’t know what to make of that comment, so he didn’t answer. A new silence began before Yuuri broke it again with: “What is it like, working in a library?”

He thought about it for a second. “Hmm. Calm, I guess? But chaotic.”

“Those shouldn’t go together,” said Yuuri laughing. This was the wrong thing to focus on, but Yuuri’s laugh was a bit infectious; it made it hard for you not to at least smile along, which Victor promptly did. 

“Yes, well. Some days nothing happens, and some days… _everything_ happens! Between the events we have to run and people asking you for books they don’t want, or showing you their brain scans, or protesting _Harry Potter—”_

“Wait wait wait, hold on,” said Yuuri. “What do you _mean_ , showing you their brain scans?!”

Victor bit back another smile. “There’s this guy who comes in sometimes, and he always, always has his brain scans with him. Or, well,” he reconsidered, “at least I hope they’re his. And he insists on showing them to me.”

“What… what do you do?” Yuuri asked, bewildered even as the corner of his lips twitched in amusement.

“I let him, of course,” said Victor mockingly serious. “The library, and therefore the librarian, is always there for the community, Yuuri.”

Yuuri’s laughter then was so loud it echoed around the empty streets and finally, Victor allowed himself to let out a small laugh with him.

“What about you, what do you do?” he asked Yuuri.

The shrug that came with the answer was so indifferent that Victor expected something boring and mundane — instead, what he got was, “I’m a ballet dancer.”

Victor’s eyes widened. “Oh my god, that’s amazing! Where?!”

“Oh, you know,” Yuuri mumbled, giving another shrug before muttering something in response that Victor couldn’t make out.

“Sorry?”

“The NY City Ballet,” Yuuri said louder, a blush coloring his face, highlighting features that were already beautiful to begin with. It was so distractingly pretty that it took him a couple of seconds to fully register the answer. When he did, it hit him like a freight train.

“Wait. _The_ NY City Ballet?! Yuuri, this is incredible!! _You_ are incredible!”

Yuuri’s eyes grew three sizes. “I’m… really not? I was lucky, that’s all!”

“Pff, yeah, right! So wait, does that mean you’re in this year’s _The Nutcracker?”_

“Yeah, I am! That’s why I was so late for dinner, actually.”

“Who do you play?” asked Victor curiously. He’d been planning to buy a ticket; if he did, he could keep an eye out for Yuuri in the corps.

“Um… I uhh… I’m herr Drosselmeyer?” said Yuuri, with an incomprehensible question mark at the end. Except that somehow, that question mark seemed to be a constant with Yuuri.

Victor stopped walking for two seconds, only rejoining Yuuri when he looked back at him in surprise.

“Yuuri,” he said calmly, “are you telling me that you’re one of the principal dancers at the NY City Ballet? And that you had the gall to tell me right now that you were ‘just lucky’?”

The spluttering that followed would’ve been sad if it weren’t the single most comical thing in Victor’s twenty-seven years of life. Hands in his pockets, he watched it and let it go on for as long as Yuuri could keep it up. When he seemingly gave up, Victor added, “I have to go see it, then.”

Yuuri sighed. “If it’s just to see me, don’t waste your time. But!” he continued before Victor protested, “I can get you tickets!”

Turning around a corner, Sheepshead Bay station came into view. Instead of going in, Victor leaned against a lamp post.

“Well, it just so happens I love _The Nutcracker,_ so I just might take you up on that offer! But I’m afraid it’s just ‘ticket’. Singular. Yakov — my uncle — he’s… probably gonna pass.”

“And no Mari, of course,” said Yuuri softly, to which Victor rushed to confirm with a “yeah, of course.”

“Your uncle doesn’t like ballet, then? I get that a lot,” said Yuuri wrinkling his nose in sympathy.

“Well, he used to, he married a ballerina.” At Yuuri’s ‘used to?’ he elaborated, “She left a few years ago. She was invited to teach at the Bolshoi, and he didn’t want to go, but she didn’t want to stay here, so… she left. And took my cousin Yura with her, too. So he hasn’t been too fond of ballet lately, and it’s been just me and him ever since.” And Yakov had made for very poor company, he might add.

“I see.” After a pause, Yuuri looked away. “Is that… all your family?”

He’d tried to sound disinterested, he really had. Victor appreciated the effort; after all, there weren’t many delicate ways to ask someone about their unmentioned parents.

Victor shook his head. “Dad died when I was a baby, and Mom… she passed away five years ago. Lilia divorced Yakov right after that. So yeah, he’s all the family I got.”

Yuuri nodded, thoughtful, looking at Victor like he was seeing something else — something far away. Eventually, he looked around until his face lit up as he found what he was apparently looking for: the gas station.

“Wait right here!”

Before Victor could even think about reacting, Yuuri was already on the other side of the street and going into the convenience store. He came back five minutes later with a plastic bag.

“Here,” he said, pulling out a somewhat warm hot-dog and a can of Budweiser; he shoved them in his hands and got another hot-dog and beer for himself. Opening his can, he raised it in a mute ‘cheers’ and said, “Merry Christmas!”

Victor looked at the ‘gifts’, amused. “Are these supposed to be Christmas presents?”

“Yup!” said Yuuri, beaming at him — and honestly, it was enough to light up the entire Brooklyn, that smile. He took another gulp of his beer before adding, “I, um, I didn’t have the chance to buy you anything for Christmas, sorry. But I know everyone needs a passable hot-dog and shitty beer from time to time, so there you have it!”

“You’re right about it being shitty beer,” said Victor, in the middle of his personal staring contest with his Budweiser.

“There are only two comfort foods that really do the job: your favorite food, and crappy food,” Yuuri replied, mouth half-full of hot-dog.

It was solid logic. But what amazed him was that Yuuri thought (saw?) that Victor needed comfort food. Was he that transparent? Without a word, he opened his can and took a gulp.

“Ugh,” he gasped almost immediately. “I didn’t think I was going to be poisoned right before my birthday.”

Yuuri half spit the beer he’d just drunk back into the can, and stared at Victor with enormous eyes. “Your birthday?”

Right. Victor hadn’t mentioned that to any of them. “Uhh, yeah. Twenty-eight tomorrow. Or you know. In an hour, basically. So… cheers!” He raised his can and took another swig. _God_ , this was such bad beer it made him sad for the state of the world.

Yuuri kept staring at him in shock, but didn’t reply. They both worked on their hot-dogs in silence, and when the plastic wrappings were in the trash can, Victor looked at the entrance of the subway station. He should go home now. Let Yuuri go back to his family and the dinner he still hadn’t had, while he went back to his own apartment.

So why wasn’t he moving?

Yuuri’s voice came out hesitantly, tiptoeing around him. “Listen, I know you must be in a hurry to get home—”

“Not really,” said Victor.

Yuuri continued with a small smile, “How about we walk these off, then? The next station is not too far, so maybe we could… I don’t know.”

“Keep walking? Yeah, let’s!”

“Really?”

“Yuuri Katsuki, there’s no one waiting for me, remember? Let’s go.” Without waiting for an answer, Victor started walking, and soon Yuuri was by his side again — this time, tossing him a bar of Snickers. 

“Any nut allergies?”

“Nope,” said Victor cheerfully, opening the wrapping.

* * *

Victor discreetly adjusted the scarf around his neck, trying to get more warmth out of it. Noticing it, Yuuri gently raised a hand to feel the fabric of the scarf. “This is a bit too thin. Not a great choice for winter.”

“Yeah, I know, I just. I like it.” After a moment of hesitation, he added, “It was my mom’s.”

“That’s a very good reason,” said Yuuri. One beat of silence went by, and then, “What was she like?”

“My mom? Hmm, like me, I guess. Tall, platinum blonde, looked like a girl.”

Yuuri huffed a laugh, sending out more puffs of hot air that instantly dissolved into the cold December night. “You don’t look like a girl!”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind it,” said Victor, wrapping another loop of the scarf around his neck. “People used to tell me I did, when I had long hair.”

“Long hair? Hmm,” Yuuri thought about it. “You must’ve looked beautiful. I mean, not that you don’t look beautiful _now,_ of course. I mean!” Yuuri frantically waved his hands, his face going up in flames. “Your hair! Your hair is bea— is, is great! It looks… soft, and, I mean, just… generally well-taken care of, so I’m _assuming_ it looked like that when it was long, is what I’m saying!”

He stopped to take a deep breath, and was about to continue when Victor raised a hand, like one who wants to pet a wild horse and doesn’t know how the horse’s going to react. Yuuri closed his mouth.

“Thank you,” said Victor, smiling. “I’m really proud of my hair, so I appreciate it.”

Yuuri let out his breath. “Okay. Cool.”

In a few more steps, they both stood in front of the entrance to the Brighton Beach station. They raised their heads and looked at the sign.

Silence.

“Ocean Parkway station is not too far,” said Victor eventually.

Yuuri nodded. “Let’s go.”

* * *

Ocean Parkway station came and went without so much as an acknowledgment from either of them. They’d been too busy exchanging pictures of poodles on their phones and lamenting how impossible it was for either of them to have one.

“But you mark my words,” said Victor. _“One day.”_

“One day,” Yuuri agreed solemnly. “When I don’t live by myself in a tiny apartment, it’s gonna happen!”

“You don’t live with them?” asked Victor.

Yuuri shook his head. “It’s just not practical anymore, with Lincoln Center and Saratoga being so far. But I visit every weekend, and at least I can send them some money to, you know, help with the inn and stuff.”

“Is the inn…” Victor hesitated. Was that too intrusive to ask?

Yuuri guessed the rest of the question. “No no no, it’s fine now! But it wasn’t some years ago. And at the time, Mari — and I’m sure she didn’t tell you that,” he added with a crooked smile, “but Mari quit college to work full time at the inn just so I wouldn’t have to. So I could keep dancing.” He looked straight into Victor’s eyes. “She’s the reason I have a career.”

Victor held his breath. If he’d never felt like a crappy excuse for a human being before, this would’ve been a spectacular first time; good thing, then, that he’d been feeling like one for the past two days.

These were the people he was lying to, and the woman he was lying about. Kind, honest people, capable of every sacrifice for their loved ones, people who’d welcomed a lonely stranger into their home as if he were one of them. Something that could not be further from the truth because, unlike him, the Katsukis wouldn’t keep up a lie of that magnitude for that long. He doubted they could even keep up a tiny one for a few minutes. And yet here he was, lying to them and himself with the flimsy excuse that it was Christmas, a holiday that was sacred to none of them.

“She’s just… she’s the best,” said Yuuri, face full of adoration.

Victor sighed. “Yeah. She’s the best.”

* * *

It was close to one in the morning when they went past Coney Island-Stillwell Ave. station and reached Victor’s apartment building. In front of Victor’s block, the entire ground was now frozen solid, looking pristinely dangerous. Victor looked at it with some dread.

“Well, this is gonna be fun in these shoes,” he muttered. Yuuri nudged him playfully, which already got another smile out from him.

“We got this far, didn’t we? I’ll take you to your door, come on.”

They carefully ventured onto the icy ground, Victor taking slow, wary steps and trying short slides.

“Are you gonna go see Mari tomorrow? Whoa, oh my g—” Yuuri’s foot slid from under him and Victor caught him before he hit the ground, sacrificing his own balance in the process. His feet skidded away from each other and Yuuri’s arms were suddenly the only thing holding him in place. A part of him marveled at how firm those biceps were, while another couldn’t help but note that now he had his nose buried in Yuuri’s neck and just how _good_ he smelled. There was the smell of winter and fresh laundry in his clothes, but Yuuri’s neck had a dash of coconut and just… the smell of Yuuri’s skin. It was all Victor could do not to take a small bite.

“Ouch,” was his only outward reaction, instead.

Yuuri’s shoulders shook with laughter. “You okay there?”

“Not really,” said Victor with a snort. He slowly arranged himself, gingerly moving his hands from Yuuri’s waist to his shoulders like he was climbing a rock, trying to bring his feet closer to each other without losing complete balance again. Yuuri tried (badly) to suppress more laughter. “Glad you think I’m funny,” Victor mumbled, failing not to smile and wrapping his hands around Yuuri’s neck as he climbed his way up.

“I do, actually.” Yuuri’s warm breath was now only a few inches from Victor’s lips, and his hands firmly placed on the small of Victor’s back. Undignified as his current position might be — still not fully erect and hanging on tight to someone else in order not to fall — it did have the advantage of leaving him on eye level with Yuuri, his own hands still wrapped around the nape of Yuuri’s neck.

Victor exhaled slowly, and Yuuri’s eyes flitted to his lips before snapping back up.

“You alright?” Yuuri whispered.

Victor swallowed and nodded, before answering with a weak “Yeah.”

They moved at a slow pace, still clinging to each other and chortling at themselves, but managed to reach the door of the building without falling again. Victor finally found himself in front of the only entrance he couldn’t walk past to buy a few more minutes of tonight.

“Delivered, safe and sound,” said Yuuri, rewrapping around Victor’s neck the scarf that he’d somehow managed to dislodge during their ice dance. “I’ll wait till you get inside.”

“Well, then,” Victor replied, another smile on his face — and he’d lost count of how many there’d been tonight. If he were a betting man, he’d say ‘more than the count of the entire year’. “Thank you for the company, Yuuri. Good night.”

Yuuri smiled, and once again, it was only for Victor. A small, soft smile, warm like a cup of hot chocolate on a winter night. “Night.”

Victor opened the door, and turned towards Yuuri one more time. “I’ll, uhh… see you when I see you?”

“Yeah. See you soon,” he said, voice so quiet it was only the dead silence of the street that allowed Victor to hear it.

With a final wave, he went into the building and up the stairs. Two floors, apartment 201. He walked in as noiselessly as possible (Mrs. Rygalski in 202 was a big one for complaining). Once the door was locked behind him, Victor leaned his head against it with a _thump_ and closed his eyes. He knew he was a dumbass, but he hadn’t known to what extent until tonight. He’d gone and done the last thing he should or could have.

He was completely infatuated with Yuuri Katsuki.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is an AU of the 95 movie "While You Were Sleeping", which basically put Sandra Bullock on the map as a romcom leading lady, made me have a whole new appreciation for raspy gravelly voices (thank you, Bill Pullman), and is my all-time favorite romcom.
> 
> It's also my favorite Christmas movie, so when I signed up for a Christmas exchange, I knew what I had to do XD
> 
> Aya, love you, you're an adorable human being, thank you for being so kind and cheerful to everyone around you, I hope you enjoy this, and please know that I'll be posting ch.2 in a couple of days, it's almost done! ^_^
> 
> Thanks to my beautiful wife and beta [Rae](https://regardingluv.tumblr.com/). As always: what of me without you? ♡♡♡ Everyone, please give Rae a round of applause for all the crazy she has to put up with as an actual librarian. Like. Brain Scan Guy? HER true story. She is Victor. Please love her.
> 
> You guys can find me on [Tumblr](http://thehobbem.tumblr.com/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/thehobbem)!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the change in number of chapters OTL

“Are you gonna fold?” Yuuri asked.

Silence.

“Oh, so you’re _not_ gonna fold? Wow, that is just… that’s so you.” 

Mari didn’t answer or react, just like she hadn’t for the past couple of days.

“Alright, then, let’s see what you have,” he said. He reached for the cards he’d placed in front of her and flipped them over. “Ohhh, staying in with a pair? Why would you do something so stupid, yet so brave,” he mumbled, showing her his own hand. “Sorry. Full house.”

He shook his head. “Well, you know what they say. Lucky in cards… you can’t have everything, missy. Not that you’ve ever tried,” he added softly. His sister still looked paler than she’d ever been, and her blonde hair and dark roots fanned out in stark contrast with the spotlessly white pillow.

“No, you always try to give me everything, instead,” he continued, collecting the cards spread on the bed sheet. “Like using your free time to tutor me in Math, or your allowance to buy me dance shoes — oh you thought I didn’t know that? Yeah, well, think again. You’re impossible, did you know that? Pff, giving me your own bike when mom and dad couldn’t buy me one. ‘I’m too old for bikes’,” he said, in a high-pitched imitation of her voice that was comically far from the real thing. “Seriously. And now I get to go out and have my dream job while you’re stuck here.”

Distractedly, Yuuri shuffled the cards and redistributed them — five for him, five for her. He examined his hand.

“Okay, I bet you five dollars. What’s that? You call _and_ raise another five? You seem confident.” He discarded one card and took another from the deck.

“And I told myself, ‘when the time comes, I’ll repay her. I’ll pay her double. I’ll give instead of take, for once, I’ll give her everything she deserves and more’. But here I am now,” he mumbled to himself, “wanting what’s yours once again, like the shitty brother I am.” He frowned at his cards. “Alright, I fold. What do you got?”

He flipped over her cards: a 2 of spades, a 5 of hearts, a 7 of clubs, a 3 of diamonds, a jack of diamonds and an ace of hearts. She wouldn’t have been much worse if she’d had no cards at all.

Setting his own hand — a Royal Flush of hearts — face down on the sheet, his smile felt limp even to himself.

“You win.”

* * *

Yakov stared at him, a shirt half-folded in his hands.

“Vitya,” he said — slowly, unbelievingly — “you think I have time for this?”

“No no no no no no, you have to tell me what to dooooo,” Victor whined, sinking on Yakov’s bed and burying his face on the pillow.

“You’re twenty-eight, you know damn well what you have to do!” he barked. “Tell. them. the. truth!”

Victor answered without even lifting his head from the pillow, which earned him another bark from Yakov: “What?”

He raised his head. “I _said_ that if I tell them the truth Yuuri’s never gonna speak to me again!”

“And what do you think is going to happen when that girl wakes up?! Are you insane?”

Probably, but that was beside the point. “I wanted to tell them the truth, but it was… complicated. Yakov, they were so happy! I couldn’t just go ‘nope, sorry, your daughter has nobody, have a nice day!’. That would’ve been cruel!”

“Right, but what you’re doing now is kind,” said Yakov, every word like a bite. He went back to folding clothes and carefully placing them in the suitcase. “Vitya, they’re a family. A _family._ You don’t get to come in just because you want to; they’re not a bar!”

Victor turned on his back and faced the ceiling. “Yeah, I know. I know I should tell them, I just… if you’d been there you’d understand. They were so _thankful,_ and… and, I don’t know, it was like I was one of their own? Like they’d known me my whole life, and Mrs. Katsuki is…” _Like a mother,_ but he didn’t complete that sentence. He didn’t have to, not to Yakov.

And then there was Yuuri. He couldn’t even start about Yuuri, because he wouldn’t know where to end.

With a deep sigh, Yakov rubbed his eyes. “Vitya, of course I understand. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be going all the way to goddamn Russia to try and get my own family back. But I’m not trying to get them back by lying to them. Do you see the difference?”

If he didn’t, they wouldn’t be having this conversation to begin with.

“I don’t want to be lying to them,” he mumbled.

Yakov stopped packing to throw Victor a glare. “The only reason why I’m not dragging you to the Katsukis’ to confess right now is because I know you’re not doing this on purpose. You’re doing it because you’re a dumbass!”

“Thanks,” said Victor, still staring at the ceiling. Was Yakov wrong? No. Did that give him any idea as to what to do — or rather, how to do it? Also no.

Goddamn the minute he rode that ambulance.

* * *

“So Victor, how long have you and Mari been together?” asked Yuuko.

Victor stopped, smile dying on his lips for a fleeting second before he put it back on. The thing about lying was that you never had a moment’s rest; just when you thought you were safe and comfortable, it slapped you in the face again.

And he deserved every one of those slaps, even more so for agreeing to come back and have another dinner with the Katsukis — just to give them the Christmas gifts he’d bought them, he’d told himself. Just to see them one last time (or rather, to see Yuuri one last time).

His reward for his poor choices was Yuuri not being here yet and questions about his “relationship” with Mari.

“Um, we uhh… she… well, she caught my attention in February,” he said. She’d taken Borges’ _Labyrinth,_ a book that had never seen the light of day for as long as Victor had worked there, and one of his all time favorites. He’d started paying attention to Intimidating Japanese Woman then. “And everything went from there, I guess.”

Yuuko’s “aaaww” was echoed around the table, and followed by Minako’s “Well, now we gotta find someone for Yuuri.”

Victor choked on his drink.

“True,” said Takeshi, mouth full of chicken, “he only thinks about dancing, he’ll never find anyone like that. Do you know any single guy you could introduce to him?”

“I...” he stared at Takeshi, mind scrambling for something convincing to say that wasn’t _‘Thanks, but I don’t want to’_ or _‘Me, me!’._

What even would be Yuuri’s type? Somehow, Victor had a hard time believing it would be lying librarians, no matter how handsome. Or librarians so desperate for company they would lie their way into affection. Librarians who had nothing to offer.

“I don’t really know Yuuri’s type,” he replied. He and his half-baked truths.

“Um, skinny, dark-haired guys, why exactly are we talking about this?” said Yuuri, coming in that same instant with suspicious eyes.

“Yuuri, finally!” said one of the triplets (Loop? Lutz? Victor could only confidently tell Axel apart so far).

“I am very sorry, miss Axel Nishigori,” said Yuuri with deep gravity (and welp, there went Victor’s only certainty), “I’ll be more punctual next time.”

“Any news?” his mother asked, and her quietly resigned voice cracked Victor’s heart. Mrs. Katsuki probably hid so much beneath her façade of calm resignation and patience. Victor was used to being a son without a mother, was numbed by it even, but would hate to see Mrs. Katsuki become a mother without a daughter — just as much as he knew with undeniable clarity that she would never become numb to it. She would feel it every single day for the rest of her life.

Yuuri shook his head. “But the doctor is optimistic. She said there should be some improvement soon,” he said, hanging his coat by the door. No one said anything after that for a while, the only sounds filling the room being the soft drag of Yuuri’s chair against the rug and the clink of cutlery around the table.

Letting his eyes roam around the table, Victor found Yuuko’s trained on Yuuri, almost unblinkingly.

“Since when is Phichit your type?” she asked eventually, breaking the silence of the room.

It was Yuuri’s turn to choke on his water.

“Yeah, I thought you liked tall, broad-shouldered blond guys,” said Minako, fully turning on her chair in his direction. “Phichit’s nothing like that.”

“I didn’t say my type is Phichit!”

“You might as well have,” his father contributed calmly.

“Dad!”

Victor cleared his throat. He shouldn’t have any stakes in this conversation, and yet he couldn’t help but feel the inconvenient pull. “Who’s Phichit?”

Wrong move. The entire table, including the triplets, tried to explain the Phichit person at the same time, and the only words he managed to discern among the pandemonium of voices were “friend”, “ballet”, “Thailand” and a muttered “the devil” from Yuuri himself.

By his side, Mrs. Katsuki gently tapped his arm and he turned to her, not unlike a compass towards the north.

“He’s Yuuri’s best friend,” she said serenely. “Have some more potatoes, Vicchan.”

Friend. Good. Great, even. He would definitely have more potatoes. As he helped himself again, Mr. Katsuki made a comment in Japanese that, judging by Minako’s chortle, must’ve been really amusing.

“Dad,” said Yuuri tiredly, “in English.”

“So, Yuuri, tell Victor what kind of man you’re looking for, maybe he knows someone,” his mom continued, resurrecting the topic to Yuuri’s flagrant chagrin.

“I’m not looking for a man,” he said carefully.

“Pff, don’t be ridiculous,” Minako scorned.

“Rihanna’s not looking for a man, either, so you’re in good company,” said Victor, winking at Yuuri. That gave him the smile he’d been waiting for.

Takeshi beamed. “Neither am I!”

Yuuko rolled her eyes. On the other side of the table, Mr. Katsuki volunteered his opinion on the matter:

“Cary Grant was gay.”

The entire company turned their eyes to him, with the exception of his wife, who nodded in agreement. Truly, Victor thought, that had to be the ultimate power of marriage: allowing you to perpetually be on each other’s wavelengths, even when no one else understood you.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” demanded Minako.

“If it was good enough for Cary Grant, it should be more than good enough for anyone else,” he declared, his face serenity itself.

Mrs. Katsuki turned to Victor once again, taking the role of his translator for the evening: “Toshiya loves _Bringing Up Baby.”_ And that, apparently, was all the explanation he was going to get.

Yuuko leaned forward on the table. “Have you ever felt attracted to Cary Grant, Mr. Katsuki?”

Yuuri rubbed the bridge of his nose, the picture of exhaustion. “What the hell kind of question…” Victor almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

Mr. Katsuki considered the question. “Hmm, I don’t think so, my dear. But then,” he looked at his wife, twining their hands together, “I was lucky enough to find the perfect person early on in life.”

To Victor’s utter delight, Mrs. Katsuki blushed and cast her eyes down, not knowing what to say for a moment. So that’s where Yuuri had gotten it from, then. It figured.

“That’s so nice of you to say, dear,” she giggled, tapping her husband’s arm with one hand, and half hiding her face with the other, “but I’m sure I’m far from perfect.”

“That is absolutely not true, Mrs. Katsuki,” said Victor with conviction.

He caught a glimpse of a smile from Minako on the other end of the table — a feat, Minako was not much of a smiler — and he could definitely feel Yuuri’s eyes fastened on him; when he glanced at him, though, Yuuri looked down at his plate again. Meanwhile, Mrs. Katsuki was babbling (another Yuuri trait traced back to its origin).

“Vicchan, please, you don’t… this is too— you’re too kind, I don’t— oh, you children, really, now— no, no, Yuuko dear, I’m fine,” she said, when Yuuko offered her some water, “I just… really, Vicchan, you shouldn’t— here, let me get you some more wine, excuse me… no no no, you can stay right there, I’ll be right back.”

Victor watched wide-eyed as she left the room in a hurry to get another bottle of wine, even though there was still half a bottle on the table. On his right, Takeshi shot him a grin.

“She’s this close to dying, you know that, right?”

“Yes, Victor, please don’t kill my mother,” said Yuuri, snorting into his glass.

“Wh— I said the truth!”

“Damn right you did,” said Minako, downing the rest of her own wine. “Everyone knows it but her.”

* * *

“Well, it’s official: my mom loves you,” said Yuuri.

He still didn’t look at Victor, but at least now he had the excuse of having to keep his eyes on the road: Mrs. Katsuki had insisted that Yuuri take their car and drive Victor back, despite all of Victor’s protests about the subway station being right there and the early hour. This time she had come out on top, immovable in her decision to have Victor back home safe and sound, and now he was alone with Yuuri in the Katsukis’ Toyota.

Being alone with Yuuri again was the one thing he’d longed for all day — being alone with him and listening to the things he’d say, counting his smiles and bathing in his laugh, being allowed to simply stare at him for ridiculously long stretches of time. But all that melted away at the thought that Yuuri had barely exchanged a glance with him the entire night.

Head up against the window as he watched the streets run by outside, Victor chuckled lightly. “Yes, well, I can assure you I love her right back.”

The car slowed to a stop at a red light, and Yuuri turned to Victor. Fully, for a change tonight. “You mean that, don’t you?”

Victor raised his eyebrows. "Yes, I do. Um. Shouldn't I?"

Yuuri looked at him with an indecipherable expression, and Victor would've paid good money to know what he was thinking. _"You lying piece of crap"_ was a good guess. _"You think lying is love?"_ was another. But then, those sounded more like Victor's thoughts. 

Changing gears again as the light turned green, Yuuri finally broke off his staring contest with a shake of the head, saying something under his breath that Victor couldn't quite make out but that he could've sworn had the word 'cute' in it.

They drove in silence once again, and Victor told himself that this was better for everyone involved. The less he saw or talked to Yuuri, the better. The better for Yuuri, at least.

He tried to focus on the scenery outside, on the apartment lights and street lamps being left behind at a surprisingly low speed; Yuuri didn’t seem to be fond of driving too fast. They were also inexplicably going all the way down Avenue Y instead of simply taking Belt Parkway, which made for a much longer route. Yuuri must be distracted.

“I’m sorry she doesn’t love you enough to learn how to make decent cheesecake, though,” Yuuri added suddenly, and Victor snickered. While he would never, _ever_ bring up the fact that Mrs. Katsuki’s cheesecake was borderline inedible, he was also not going to contradict it.

“I hope you’ve had bett— _different_ cheesecake experiences as you grew up, is all I’m gonna say,” said Victor.

Yuuri groaned. “Not a lot, to be honest. I kind of… put on weight easily? And I would definitely lose my job if I was above a certain weight,” he said bitterly. “I’m always on a diet.”

Oh. That explained the hungry, nearly lustful looks he’d given the potatoes at the table while not having even a tiny serving. It had made Victor wonder what the potatoes had ever done to Yuuri.

A thought struck him. “Wait. Tell me you’ve had Junior’s.”

“Junior’s cheesecake?” Yuuri shook his head mournfully. “Nope.”

Victor clutched his chest. “Yuuuuuri, you have to! How are you going to go through life without having the best cheesecake in the world?”

Yuuri said nothing for a while; but after a quick side-eyed look, he said, “Well, it is your birthday — yeah, don’t think I forgot that, Mr. Nikiforov — so it’s only fair that you get better cheesecake than mom’s.” When Victor stared at him, Yuuri opened his hands briefly before returning them to the wheel. “Listen, I don’t make the rules!”

Victor beamed. “Let me get the directions, then!”

* * *

This had been the worst idea Victor had ever had.

Spending more time with Yuuri was great. Best birthday gift, hands down. And he could never put a price on the sight of him throwing caution to the wind and devouring that cheesecake with the hunger of a 19th street urchin in a Dickens novel.

But he could definitely do without the moaning noises that escaped Yuuri at every bite. Or without how much he felt like licking the crumbles of cheesecake off the corner of his lips, because Lord and savior, Victor was _dying._

“Are you gonna eat that?” Yuuri asked, nodding at the barely-touched slice on Victor’s plate. Victor pushed it towards Yuuri without a word — if he spoke right now, his voice just might come out all squeak and no substance. Better avoid that.

“Thanks,” said Yuuri in between bites, which was unnecessary. The look of unparalleled happiness on Yuuri’s face was all the thanks he needed, and he’d be damned if he wasn’t already trying to come up with other ways besides food to make Yuuri that overjoyed.

Belatedly, he realized Yuuri had said more than just “thanks”, and was already at the end of a full sentence.

“...myself.”

Victor blinked. “Err, sorry, I didn’t catch that?”

“I said I gotta drop by the library, finally get my own card so I can go and pick the books myself instead of Mari. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “I’d have to go on Saturday mornings, because I get here really late on Fridays. Are you there on Saturdays?”

“Yes, I am, but— hold on.” Victor put a hand up. There was some serious lede burying going on here. “What do you mean, ‘instead of Mari’?”

Yuuri stared at him, mouth full of cheesecake. “Well, if I go myself, she won’t have to. But of course, I’m sure you’d rather see her,” he said, with the faintest curl of his lips as he cast his eyes down back to the plate.

“So she… she goes to the library for you? The books are for you? _Labyrinth_ was for you?” asked Victor, not quite stopping to breathe between one question and the next; it was hard to breathe when your mind was too busy reeling.

“I thought you knew; didn’t Mari tell you?”

Victor shook his head, still half dazed. “No, she didn’t.” It was small comfort that he had technically not told a lie yet. Lying by omission was another conversation entirely, one Victor didn’t want to have with himself right now — what he was hearing now was way more life-changing.

“I was too shy when I was a kid,” said Yuuri, “and I wanted to have a library card and get books, but I didn’t want to talk to people to do that. So Mari did it for me.” He shrugged, a nostalgic timbre playing in his voice. “She picked books she thought I’d like, but these days I just send her a list.”

“Right,” Victor says, nodding slowly. All those books — Yuuri. The intelligent, ever-interested mind, the sharp sense of humor. Yuuri. The someone with whom he wanted to share his opinions about books, people, the world as a whole. All Yuuri.

Someone to laugh with.

Victor was so screwed.

He should go home. Now. Before this got even more complicated, before his and other people's hearts ended up in tatters. Before there was no turning back. Before— 

Yuuri looked up from his plate, his smile creating tiny crinkles around his nose, each one a trial to look at without kissing.

Victor leaned forward. “Your thoughts on _Bleak House?”_

* * *

Of all the new, slightly disorienting events of the last few days, getting home past one in the morning two nights in a row shouldn’t have placed very high on Victor’s list. And yet, there was something about it. It could be the sheer newness of the occurrence, or that it was the first time he got to experience those streets without the noise of cars, the buzz of conversation and the screams of children coming back from school. Or maybe the fact that it was he who now disrupted the silence with conversation and laughter, instead of being the sole point of solitary silence. Perhaps it was just Yuuri existing in his orbit. All of it a novelty, and none something he was willing to give up too fast.

The sidewalk in front of his building was still covered in ice, but they managed to cross it with much more grace and dignity than the night before, getting to the door in one piece and without needing to cling to each other — lamentably so, from Victor’s point of view.

“And I know,” Yuuri carried on, unaware of Victor’s laments and relentless on his rant, “I know it’s a great classic, but really now, Anna Arkadyevna Karenina — did I pronounce that right? — deserved _better,_ that was some bleak bullshit. I’m never reading that again, once is enough, thank you, Russia.”

“I think you just described the entirety of Russian literature,” said Victor coolly.

“Ye— thank you! I’m sorry, but I’ve done my time. No more Russians for me.”

Victor raised an eyebrow. “Ouch.”

With a laugh, Yuuri slapped his arm (a habit he’d obviously picked up from Minako. Like godmother, like godson). “Not you! As if I could quit you now!”

The words tightened in Victor’s chest, joining all the smiles Yuuri had ever given him and making a home out of the desolate expanse that he called his heart — and immediately dissolved and fell behind as Victor’s brain whispered, _“But you will have to. I will have to.”_

He expected the hand that slapped his arm to go back into the coat pocket it had come from. Instead, Yuuri looped his arm through Victor’s. “Who else am I gonna rant to about my favorite books? You did say the librarian is always there for the community, right?”

“Very true,” laughed Victor. “In that case, I'll make sure you always have someone to talk about how boring Russians are,” he answered with a wink. 

Fascinated, he watched Yuuri's cheeks dust with pink; why was it so easy to make him blush? So tempting? Why was it so damn adorable? Why did Victor want to make it happen again and again?

(Well, he knew the answer to that last one. It was because he wanted to make Yuuri happen to him again and again.)

And through the blush his smile shone even brighter, immediately finding a reflection of itself in Victor once more — he couldn’t think of a day when it wouldn’t. How could it not? Wherever it touched, it spread and took root, made it its own dominion until Victor could do nothing but obey and smile back at him. He could do it for days. Years, probably.

They said nothing else for a while, and the silence of the night cocooned itself around them and confined them in each other’s eyes. The light coming through the front door of the building landed solely on Yuuri, casting him in a warm glow and making every bat of his dark, thick eyelashes a featherlike wonder — and Victor stared. He stared at all the little things that made Yuuri — smile, glasses, untameable hair, eyes of mahogany and skin of gold, sheer unattainability — stared until he wasn’t sure whether there even was anyone else on earth but the two of them, stared until breathing was painful.

Stared until the eyes he couldn’t let go of suddenly widened, and the lips he couldn’t stop daydreaming about turned round in a small “oh.”

“I forgot!” he said, suddenly patting his coat in search of something. “God, I’m so stupid, how could I… hold on. It has to be— here!” he added triumphantly, after finding what he was looking for in one of his coat’s inside pockets: a tiny stuffed animal.

No.

A tiny stuffed brown poodle. Delicately, Yuuri took one of Victor’s hands and placed the poodle in it.

“It’s unfair for you not to get anything for your birthday,” he said softly. “And you know, since we talked about poodles and all, I thought…” he trailed off with a one-shouldered shrug.

Victor looked from the gift to Yuuri, and back at the gift. The poodle had fluffy brown fur, the cutest black button eyes and a pink bow around its neck. He’d fleetingly mentioned to one of the triplets during dinner last night that pink was his favorite color, and somehow, Yuuri had heard it among the chaos of voices around the Katsuki table. Heard it, and remembered.

He blinked a few times, keeping that inconvenient mist in his eyes at bay. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten a birthday gift. Yakov was not one for that kind of sentimentality, and Victor’s mother had been too sick, too fragile in the last few years of her life for her to be able to do anything for his birthday; he hadn’t cared, hadn’t even thought about it back then, she’d been his sole priority. But now that she was gone, now that no one remembered, it felt like falling through the cracks.

“His name’s Vicchan.”

Victor’s eyes snapped back up instantly. “Vicchan?”

“Yeah, like my mother…? I mean!” Yuuri’s eyes went from gentle to horrified in the span of half a second. “I thought— you know, I thought it was cute? Because mom calls you that, and it’s this endearment in Japanese? But you know what, you can forget that, it’s weird to have a dog with your name, so you can just—”

“I love it.”

Yuuri froze. He looked at Victor for a long moment, as if trying to ascertain whether he was secretly annoyed and just being polite, but Victor nodded and smiled.

“I love the name Vicchan. Thank you, Yuuri.”

“Okay,” said Yuuri, the tension on his shoulders visibly melting. “So… yeah. There you are. Happy birthday, Victor,” he said, voice going down to a quiet murmur.

Victor stroked the fur on the head of the poodle — of Vicchan — and nodded again without a word. He didn’t quite trust his voice for the moment.

After a beat Yuuri added, mildly amused, "This should tide you over till the real poodle comes along. We’ll have one someday."

We.

His heart picked up dangerously at the pronoun. But after a couple of seconds, its implicit meaning seemed to finally sink in, and the blush Victor adored instantly showed up and spilled down Yuuri’s neck.

Yuuri took a step back.

"I mean, you know. You'll have your own poodle one day, and… and I'll have mine. In my house. Separate poodles."

Victor carefully put Vicchan in one of his pockets and took a step back himself. "Yeah. Of course."

With a small laugh just on this side of sour, Yuuri added, “Good luck with Mari, though, she’s not that fond of dogs.”

“What, really?” Victor asked, and immediately cursed himself: Mari not liking dogs was obviously the kind of thing her boyfriend would know.

“Well, more like… she says she doesn’t make a point of having one. But I’m sure she’ll feel differently when you get one,” said Yuuri with a grin. “She’s too soft not to. But yeah, I never thought she’d end up with a dog person. Then again,” he continued, thoughtfully, “I never thought she’d be with someone like—” he stopped, and the hand that was clearly about to gesture at Victor aborted it and fell limp by his side. 

It was the abruptness with which he interrupted himself, more than the actual words, that raised an unpleasant alarmin Victor’s head. He raised his eyebrows. “Someone like what?”

Someone who lied, maybe. Someone who wasn’t good enough for her, most likely.

Someone who probably wasn’t good enough for anybody, if the past… well, twenty-eight years counted as evidence. 

Yuuri opened his mouth, and closed it again. Looked back at the street, as if the answer was somewhere out there, then back at Victor. Or rather, at Victor’s left shoulder. “It’s just. You know. You’re not…” he didn’t finish, letting his ellipsis scream whatever else hesitated to come out.

Victor could feel his face slipping back into the politely detached expression he was so used to by now. The one he used with strangers and people he wished wouldn’t leave him. The one he hated.

“I’m not…?”

The way Yuuri withered fast and doubtlessly at his tone brought Victor the long familiar, cold comfort of being once again behind his own shields, even as it made his heart squirm in place.

“Her type,” Yuuri blurted out.

The word fastened around the pit of Victor’s stomach and slowly worked its way up to his throat, letting only a humourless laugh out.

He knew that already, didn't he? Knew it like he knew nothing else. After a life of no one staying, no one stopping long enough to see him, of polite words and perfunctory smiles as he watched life pass him by without so much as a glance, of wishing he could climb out of his own fractures — he knew. People had types for dating, for caring, for being friends with and laughing together. And Victor had never found himself on anyone’s list.

“Yes, well. What can I do,” he said flatly.

The dullness in his voice thudded on the space between them, and Yuuri winced. “That… came out wrong, I’m sorry. I just mean that… that you’re not _her_ type.”

Great, what that sentence really needed was more emphasis. That was enough truth for the day. Muttering a “Right,” Victor gave him a polite nod, his most affable smile, and turned around to go into the building.

He had one hand already pushing the door open when he heard an imploring:

“Victor…”

There was only a moment of hesitation — a fleeting moment in which his brain whispered “don’t” — before he turned around one last time, with a smile that felt jagged and sorry for itself.

“Whose type am I, then?”

Yuuri’s eyes flew wide. For a couple of seconds, the puffs of his hot breath vanished; when one finally reappeared, it was a long held exhale through parted lips, and Yuuri opened his hands helplessly.

“Yeah, I thought so too,” said Victor. “Good night, Yuuri.”

Without waiting for an answer, he went inside and let the door shut with a slam. Two floors, apartment 201, and he entered it with no qualms about slamming his own door either (Mrs. Rygalski in 202 could bite him).

Not bothering to take off his overcoat, Victor threw himself on the bed. When he rolled onto his side, however, he felt a lump in one of the pockets, and he soon fished out the cause: Vicchan.

_Happy birthday, Victor._

He stared at the tiny poodle until his eyelids felt heavy and his head stuffed with cotton, and the last conscious thought he had was how nice Vicchan felt, secure in his right hand under the pillow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS was supposed to be 2 chapters only — but the second one turned out so LONG that I made the executive decision to split it in 2. I'M SORRY, AYA, FOR WHOM THIS WAS WRITTEN, AND ALL THE READERS.
> 
> (I know this is not the first time I say something of the sort. And *captain Holt's voice* YOU'LL HEAR IT AGAIN)
> 
> Having said that, the final chapter is almost at an end, and once it's beta'd by the [Rae](https://regardingluv.tumblr.com/), I'll release it into the void!
> 
> Until then, you can find me on [Tumblr](http://thehobbem.tumblr.com/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/thehobbem)! ♥


	3. Chapter 3

At the first notes of Britney’s “Toxic” Victor sat up in bed, blinking and squinting at the sunlight filtering through the shutters and peppering his bed with tiny chopped beams. What time was it? Did he miss the alar— no. Day off. Okay. Good.

“Toxic” rang louder. Jesus, yeah, the phone, who was calling at — he glanced at his watch on the nightstand — _7 in the morning?!_ Stifling a yawn, he picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Victor, morning.”

“Er… Hi, Minako,” said Victor, yawning. It was less her voice, and more the way she spoke — with that perfect assurance of one not in the habit of being contradicted or interrupted — that gave her away. After Yuuri told him Minako was the former prima of the NYC Ballet, a lot of pieces had slotted into place about her, and it had finally clicked why she reminded him of Aunt Lilia: it was the unshakeable confidence that only a prima could have.

Still, not the most desirable trait to wake up to at 7 AM on his day off.

“Listen, she’s awake.”

Victor stifled another yawn. “Sure. Who’s awake?”

An irritated sigh on the other side of the line. “Not you, clearly! Who do you think?”

He closed his eyes, ready to sleep again. Speaking in riddles was far from an effective way of explaining anyth— oh. He opened his eyes.

His stomach dropped a thousand miles per hour into a pool of ice, belly first.

Fuck.

“You mean… Mari’s awake?” he asked, getting out of bed so promptly one would think his mattress was a bouncy house. He needed to _move._ ‘Where’ and ‘what for’ were irrelevant. He started putting on his overcoat over the pajamas. 

“Of course I’m talking about Mari!” Minako snapped. “Hiroko and the others are on their way already.”

Oh fuck. Fuck, fuck, _fuck._

Well, that was it, then. He had to disappear. Not just from their lives, but in general, because _they all knew where he worked._ What was to stop the Katsukis & co. to come to the library and—

Yuuri. What would Yuuri think if he just… disappeared?

"Victor, _now,"_ Minako said brusquely, and he jumped to his feet.

"Yes, ma'am, sorry, I'm going. Sorry!"

* * *

Victor was met at the entrance by a chatty Nishigori, who wasted no time with greetings and almost shoved him into the elevator.

“Doctor says she’ll have no long-term complications or anything,” he said, pushing the button to the second floor three times in his excitement. “We won’t be able to stay for long because she needs to rest, but we can stay for five minutes. Boy, will she be glad to see you!” The slap on his arm that accompanied the statement hurt less than the possibility of having his entire farce unmasked in front of the Katsukis — in front of Yuuri — but it still hurt. Why did all of them _do_ that slapping thing?!

Victor mouthed a small “ouch” while Nishigori went on. All initial exams had come back promising, but there were still a few to go through; meanwhile, they were all organizing themselves into shifts to keep Mari company for as much as possible. Yuuko had a spreadsheet on her phone, Victor could fill it with his availability later.

They were all waiting for him in front of room 12, and Victor’s heart sank: Mrs. Katsuki’s smile on seeing him was broad and radiant, while Yuuri looked away, avoiding meeting Victor’s eyes for the splinter of a second.

“Vicchan! We’re so happy you’re here!” said Mrs. Katsuki. 

He managed to babble a “good morning”, but Nishigori pushed him forward again.

“C’mon, guys, let’s go in!”

Inside the room, Mari was sitting up in bed while nurse Guang Hong adjusted her pillows. Victor glared at the nurse, the root of all his present evils. Well, him and Victor himself, of course, but it was easier to blame someone else.

They all crowded around the bed (with Victor carefully staying behind everyone else). And Mari blinkingly took them in, her head turning this and that way. She looked like she’d been run over by a truck made of exhaustion, and a far cry from the intimidating woman he was used to seeing at the library; for one long moment, the whole family stared at her in silence, like children watching the lion finally come out of his den in the zoo.

Yuuri walked up to her bed. “Hey,” he said gently, “how are you feeling?”

“Weird,” she said with a weak frown. “All you guys do is stare at me.”

Her brother snorted and just like that, the spell was broken: everyone talked at the same time, with Victor catching a “so worried” here, a “given them your purse” there, a “I owe you five bucks” from Yuuri, and a “look, Victor’s here!” that made his heart sink.

It also made Mari's frown intensify. “Who?”

Nishigori and Mrs. Katsuki stepped aside to let Victor through like Moses parting the red sea. Awkwardly, Victor shot her a pained grin and gave her a tiny wave.

She stared.

The family looked from her to him, and back again at her like an audience at a table tennis match.

Mari squinted. “...Who are you?” 

Still by her side, Yuuri went deadly still. “He’s… your boyfriend?”

Mari looked from one person to the other in the room, getting to Victor last and scrutinizing him from head to toe.

“Is this a prank? Because it’s in really poor taste, I just woke up from a coma,” she said, brow furrowing and voice ladened with annoyance.

“No, it’s…” Yuuko started, and stopped. “You… you don’t know him?”

Nine pairs of eyes locked themselves onto Victor. Again.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Licked his lips.

“Oh no,” said Minako, and the eyes turned to her. “She’s got amnesia!”

* * *

“Lacunar amnesia is a condition in which memory loss is localized and inconsistent. It’s limited to isolated events,” said the doctor.

Typing furiously on her phone, Yuuko asked without raising her eyes from it: “Like selective amnesia?”

The doctor cocked his head. “They’re not exactly the same, but… yeah, it’s near enough.”

Leaning against the threshold, Victor watched in silence. The whole family had crammed themselves into the doctor’s office, while Mari had been taken to get an MRI and a CT scan.

The doctor continued, lecturing them on the hippocampus and the amygdala — a lecture no one seemed to be following too well, if Nishigori’s glazed eyes and the way Yuuri’s yawns were becoming increasingly hard to conceal were any indication — but all Victor could think of was how to get out of there.

A small part of him also couldn’t stop thinking about how Yuuri avoided meeting his eyes. Which of course he would.

On leaving the office, someone suggested they go down to the hospital cafeteria for some breakfast, an idea that was welcomed by the whole clan; Victor took that as the opportunity to announce he had to leave, vaguely mentioning the word ‘work’. No one needed to know it was his day off — another lie to throw into his ever-growing pile.

He thought they’d bought it, until he realized there was pity in every single pair of eyes that met his (that is, all Katsukis, real and honorary, with one exception).

“This must be so hard for you,” said Mr. Katsuki, almost on tip-toe to give him an affectionate squeeze on the shoulder. “Go home, get some sleep.”

Victor smiled weakly. Between the mere four hours of sleep, and the hair he’d barely brushed while Minako hurried him on the phone, he probably did look the part of the distraught boyfriend.

Mrs. Katsuki hugged him. “Don’t worry, Vicchan. She’ll remember, she just needs more time.”

He hugged her back, his stomach dropping with the speed and weight of a freight train falling down a precipice. Whether it was possible to develop an ulcer out of sheer remorse and regret, he was just about to find out.

“Thank you, Mrs. Katsuki.”

She let him go with one final smile, and turned to her son.

“Yuuri, take Vicchan home, won’t you?”

“Wh— no no no no no no, that won’t be nec—”

“Yup,” said Yuuri, already on his feet getting the car keys from his father. With a silent nod at Victor to follow him, he started down the hall.

Without another word, Victor followed.

He followed because he was too tired to fight an offer that was not really negotiable. Followed because this could very well be the last time he would ever have with Yuuri, alone or otherwise. But above all else, he followed because, as far as he was concerned, he didn’t have it in him to say no whenever Yuuri called.

This time Yuuri took the shortest route to Victor's house, and neither of them started a conversation, with the words from last night hanging heavily in the air between them. Victor had no idea if he was owed an apology, or if he owed Yuuri one, and the fear of finding it out tied his tongue and kept his eyes fixed ahead.

Sometimes he thought he felt Yuuri’s eyes on him, but whenever he tried to catch it, all he saw was Yuuri looking at the road like a diligent driver.

He should say something. Anything. Probably not what he truly wanted to say, what he would've already confessed under ideal circumstances, but _something._ Thank him for his time and company, for the attention, for the care he’d put into their every interaction, for the poodle, for—

For letting Victor smile with him.

“We’re here,” said Yuuri, voice low and gentle as if afraid to wake Victor up from his reverie. The engine was turned off.

“Oh. Right.” Victor looked outside and then back at Yuuri — briefly, a glance that barely lasted. The sight of him made Victor’s chest constrict and coil into itself.

He looked down at his hands, finding them playing with the cuffs of his sleeves like they had a mind of their own. So that’s where his brain had gone, then.

He cleared his throat.

”Yuuri, listen… things are probably gonna be a bit different from now on, so I wanted to thank you. You’ve been so great, you’ve become…”

_The one person I want to be around all the time._

_The one person that makes me want to be at all._

“...a really good friend," he completed.

Out of the corner of his eye, there was the vague impression of Yuuri nodding.

“Friend. Yeah. You too. And, um…” There was a long pause, followed by the sound of fingers tapping on the wheel. Shave and a haircut. Two bits. “I’m sorry about what I said last night. I shouldn’t have made you feel like you guys are wrong for each other, or that you’re not her type. It’s not true. Of course you’re her type, how could _you_ not be someone’s type?”

Victor nodded, not saying a word — the only ones he could think of were _“then how come I’m not yours?”_

He opened the door and slid off the seat, and as he turned around, he put a smile back on his face. _Don’t make eye contact, say thank you, goodbye, close the door, and leave. That’s all you have to do._

“Victor.”

His eyes found Yuuri’s again. In the morning light, they looked golden hazel and wistful.

“I’m glad you won’t be alone anymore. You deserve to have someone.”

None of his planned words came out then; all of them died strangled in his throat. No thank yous, no goodbyes: a nod, a wave, and he closed the door.

It took five seconds for the car to disappear down the road, but only three for Victor to not be able to see it anymore through the tears.

* * *

Tuesday afternoons had never been much to look at. With no one coming in, Victor could hear the ticking of the clock on the other side of the library as clearly as he could hear his own thoughts.

He’d never minded it: this was when he could get most of the work done at his computer, and if he was lucky, maybe even read. But he would’ve been glad for some movement today — the more people coming up to him with requests and questions, the less he would have to spend time with himself. Where was Brain Scan Guy when you needed him the most?

As it was, Victor’s sins ran circles around him, taunting and mocking him, offering him a thousand possibilities and solutions before laughing at those too. He should just confess, and hope they wouldn’t kill him. Or confess and move to Russia. Or move to Russia without a single word to anyone.

God, how tempting.

_Tell. them. the. truth!_

Victor groaned. Did Yakov really have to be right?! Did Victor have to have morals?!

His phone vibrated on his desk and he picked it up right away: with any luck, it would be a snowstorm alert, meaning he would have to stay holed up at home for days without seeing anyone.

 **15:34 [Minako]** She’s getting discharged tomorrow, we’re having a welcome home party

 **15:34 [Minako]** Come after work

Much worse than a snowstorm. Victor sighed and banged his head on the desk. 

“Vitya, are you… okay?” Georgi asked from his station, his voice filled with concern.

“No. I suck. Everything sucks,” he moaned, not even lifting his head.

A deep, despondent sigh.

“Same.”

* * *

Victor arrived at Yu-topia just as a few patrons left the restaurant. Above the door, a giant sign said ‘Welcome home’; it had carefully designed letters, but was painted like chaos was trying to create the universe anew. That the letters were Yuuko’s design, that much was clear; whether the coloring was the triplets’ or Nishigori’s was a different story.

It was a little past 8 PM now, and his phone had been blowing up with messages from Minako and Yuuko for the last two hours. Yuuko’s hadn’t been too bad, just two or three questions split into five or six texts each (she was _that_ kind of texter). Minako, on the other hand, seemed ready to reach through the screen and drag him to Yu-topia armed with nothing but her tone of voice: messages that had started with eager “you’re leaving now, right?” and “are you on your way?” had slowly transitioned into “victor nikfrov I SWEAR TO GOD”. He’d ignored them all.

The trip from the library to Yu-topia didn't take more than 20 minutes, but Victor had had things to do before that: for starters, he'd agonized all by himself in an empty, dark library after Georgi had gone home. That alone had taken at least 40 minutes. Then he'd left get a donut and a cup of scalding coffee that burned his tongue without him even feeling it, and went back into the library. That had been followed by another half hour of fretting. Finally, he'd come to a conclusion, dropped by the nearest flower shop, and headed for Yu-topia.

Taking a deep breath, Victor passed the flowers from one arm to another, loosened his scarf — he'd wrapped it around his neck like a _noose_ — and pushed the door open.

He spotted the family gathered around a few tables pushed together before they noticed him come in, and stood there for a moment: Nishigori was laughing at something Mari said, while Minako told her off; Mr. and Mrs. Katsuki exchanged a couple of comments in quiet Japanese, and Yuuko tried to contain the triplets running around the table. Meanwhile, chin in his hands, Yuuri only watched and smiled, and the mere sight of it made the air around Victor disappear.

In a parallel universe, the nurse had never announced Victor as anyone's boyfriend, and he got to meet Yuuri as a very single man; in another, Yuuri went to the library himself every week, and Victor had, at the end of probably a few months, plucked up the courage to ask him out. In both of them, Parallel Universe Victor was now sitting beside Yuuri, smiling with him and twining their hands under the table, free in the knowledge he would wake up to that very same smile the next morning.

If he could, he'd strangle either Parallel Universe Victor and take his place in a heartbeat. 

Yuuri was the first to notice him, and Victor’s elation at having their eyes lock for a second shattered to the ground when Yuuri whispered something to his sister and looked away. Victor now found himself locking eyes with Mari, instead.

Next, an eruption of raucous cheer.

"Victooooor!" the triplets exclaimed in unison, running towards him and almost knocking him down when they clashed against his legs. When he scooped one of them up (this _had_ to be Axel, right?), she gave him a kiss on the cheek, while taking the flowers from his hands.

"Dude, you're late, what took you so long?" Nishigori asked with a wide grin.

Yuuko slapped his arm reproachfully. "He has a job!"

"Come on in, handsome foreigner, join us," said Mr. Katsuki benignly. 

“And no more sake for you,” Yuuri mumbled, cheeks on fire while moving his father’s cup and the bottle of sake away.

Mrs. Katsuki beckoned him and indicated a vacant chair next to Mari.

“Come, Vicchan, we’ve saved you a plate!”

“And by ‘a’ plate, she really means ‘five’,” said Minako with a wink. “And you’re gonna want each one of them, Hiroko’s katsudon is legendary!”

With every step Victor took, the closer he got to each of those smiles, the more tempting it was to stay. To prolong this. To just never even breathe a word of what had really happened and let things run their course. It would mean, at least, that it would be Fate, and not his own hand precipitating the inevitable end.

Except that there were two notable exceptions to those smiles. One, the person who was in theory supposed to be smiling the widest. The other, the only person whose smile Victor longed for.

Two stark reminders of what he’d come here to do.

On auto-pilot, Victor took the chair Mrs. Katsuki had pointed to, and Axel (?) gave Mari the flowers.

“Look! For you!”

Mari raised her eyebrows at him in an unspoken question; there was no welcoming warmth in her eyes, but he noticed there was no unkindness either. He nodded in confirmation.

“Yes, these are for you.” A brief moment of hesitancy before he added with a small smile, “Welcome home.” And he meant it. Regardless of his own selfish desires and lies, she deserved to be home, where she belonged. Yuuri and his family deserved to have her back.

Mari’s face softened. Almost imperceptibly, but it was there. “Thanks. Mom, could you…?”

“Yes, of course, sweetheart,” said Mrs. Katsuki, coming to take the flowers and then turning to him. “Vicchan, these are so beautiful, thank you so much.” She patted him quickly on the head before leaving, and Victor slumped a little on his chair.

“So Victor,” said Nishigori, still with a grin that showed the bottle of sake had made its rounds past him a couple of times, “you should tell Mari how you guys met, see if it jogs her memory!”

Another slap from his wife and his “ouch” served as background noise to Mari’s snappish “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

Victor glanced at Yuuri, across from him at the table, but he seemed busy with what had to be a bid for an entry at the Guinness World Records for the longest sip of water in human history. One of the triplets pulled at Victor’s sleeve, and he looked down at her.

“Tell her! She might remember!”

“Yeah, tell her!” said the other, doing finger guns the re quest most certainly didn’t ask for.

He turned to Mari, who was looking at him as much as Yuuri — that is, not at all. 

“At the library,” he said simply. To his relief, she snorted at that. Just a little, but enough to make him realize how similar the siblings actually were; it was little things, like the way laughter came out as a snort first, or how she bent her head as if to hide it, as if amusement was not something to be shown too obviously. Just enough to make him wish it was Yuuri sitting there, laughing with him instead.

“Yes, that we met at the library has been made abundantly clear to me already, but thanks!” Mari said with a smirk.

“You gotta tell her more than that, Vicchan,” said Mr. Katsuki. Victor disagreed whole-heartedly.

"Ohhh, you should kiss her!" said Axel, still on his lap. To his horror, the other two girls immediately joined in:

"Yes, kiss her!"

"A kiss will help!"

"Girls, please," said Mrs. Katsuki, returning with the flowers in a glass vase with a gentle tsc tsc at the triplets. "Don't push it."

Yuuko turned to Victor and Mari apologetically, "I'm sorry, they're impossible today, I—"

"It's not a bad idea, though," said Nishigori. Facing his wife's glare, he protested, "We don't know what might help her remember! Maybe something more sensorial will help instead of just words!"

Yuuko thought about that, and Victor wanted to scream _Don't listen to him!_

"You mean like muscle memory?" she asked at last.

Nishigori cocked his head, doubtful. "I'm not sure if that counts as muscle memory?"

“It really doesn’t,” said Victor desperately.

"That would depend on how often they used to kiss before," said Mr. Katsuki, thoughtfully.

"Listen, I don't think—" Victor started, but was cut off by Minako.

“Kiss her and she’ll remember!”

“Kiss her! Kiss her! Kiss her!” the triplets chanted.

“Yeah, kiss her!”

“Give her a kiss!”

_“I can’t!”_

The noise stopped. For the nth time in the past week, too many pairs of eyes were fixed on him with surprise.

He stood up still with Axel in his arms. “I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore.”

There was a brief moment of silence while he gently put the girl down, soon broken by the regret and embarrassment in Yuuko’s voice:

“Victor, we’re sorry, we didn’t mean to make you—”

“No no, I— it’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. Just mine. Listen, I…” he took a deep breath, held it in for five seconds that he counted slowly in his head, and let it out. 

“I can’t keep doing this. Mr. and Mrs. Katsuki,” he turned to them, and saw Mrs. Katsuki watching him with huge, worried eyes. “I… I’m in love.”

The palpable relief on her and her husband’s face was immediate, and she chuckled. “Vicchan, we know that!”

His next words came out in a whisper. “With your son.”

Mrs. Katsuki covered her mouth with her hands, while someone else gasped. On the other side of the table Minako whispered softly, “What the fuck” at the same time Yuuri mumbled “oh fuck” with his face buried in his hands.

“Yuuri, dude, what did you _do?”_ Nishigori asked, stunned.

“It wasn’t him! He didn’t do anything!” Victor hurried to explain. “It was me, it was all me! I— okay, um. Do you guys remember that day at the hospital? The first day, when we met each other?” Mrs. Katsuki nodded silently, despite the look of sheer confusion.

“So, there was a, um… misunderstanding. I just… I just work at the library. And I saw Mari being attacked, and I ran to help, and… and I was worried, I wanted to know how she was, so I stayed, but I never— The nurse was under the impression that I was Mari’s boyfriend, but…” Another deep breath. “But I’m not. I never was.”

Not a single sound was heard, which was the worst possible scenario. Silences, as a rule, didn’t last for long in the Katsuki household. Protests, gasps, f-bombs and how could yous, that was the stuff his usual nightmares about this moment were made of; silence had never been part of his imaginary equations. Amazing how reality still managed to be more devastating than nightmares.

“I was never… Mari’s boyfriend,” he repeated. What for, he couldn’t say. He only knew that, through the burning sting in his eyes, his words had only one destination this time.

At least now he finally found Yuuri looking back. There was no anger there — no, that would come later, when he’d thoroughly processed all of this. For now, there was just sad confusion.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Yuuri whispered.

Victor blinked — fast, uselessly — and whispered back, “I didn’t know how to.”

As much as he blinked, as much as he willed himself to, there was no stopping the tears from falling, or his words from coming out in broken halves as he looked at the rest of the table again.

“We never… never even actually met, other than ‘here’s your book’, ‘thank you, have a nice weekend’, and in the hospital, I just… it was all so fast, _too_ fast, and I had… I couldn’t tell you the truth, because you were so… so… ”

“Talkative?” said Yuuko in a small voice that somehow, some way, seemed to sympathize.

Victor let out a small laugh — a huffed, cracked little thing that only made the tears spill out faster.

“Yes, that too, but no, I mean… you were all so damn _welcoming._ I didn’t know how to clear things up, and then later I… I was selfish and I didn’t _want_ to clear it all up, because I just, I was so… happy.” He wiped his tears on his sleeve, without it making any difference for the next ones. “This was the first time I was… that I had a family. I don’t have— well, that’s not fair to Yakov, I guess, to say I have no one, but it feels like it. And then,” he gestured vaguely, at no one and everyone, “and then suddenly… I did. I was a brother, and a friend, and a… a son, and I haven’t been anything for so long.”

He pressed the heel of his hands into his eyes until he saw green stars in the dark. But it was better than to face any of them again — enough that he had to face himself.

No one breathed a word in response, which was to be expected; but a small part of him had hoped against hope that maybe, just maybe, someone would say “I understand”.

But there was nothing to be heard except for silence.

“I know that’s… that’s super fucked up,” he continued, unable to stop himself from spilling truths all over their floor, “and I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry, I should’ve told you the truth right there at the hospital, but I— I’m selfish and a dumbass, but just—” He took his hands off his eyes and looked at Mari. She watched him with a mix of so many different emotions Victor didn’t want to begin counting, let alone pick apart.

Breathe in, breathe out. 

“Mari, I’m sorry for this, I never meant to… well, it doesn’t matter what I meant, because I went and did it anyway, and I’m so, so goddamn sorry. But I just wanna say…” Breathe out. “I helped you that day outside the library, but you… you helped me more. All of you. You gave me the chance to be a part of your family, and I know it was just for a little while, and I _know_ it wasn’t real, but… it was still the best thing that ever—” 

If his lips would stop trembling, then maybe he’d be able to say things the way they were supposed to be said. But nothing he wanted was going to happen today. Or ever.

“I was stupid and I didn’t want to give it up,” he said. He looked at Mrs. Katsuki, and then at Yuuri — just one more time, one last time — before he whispered through the tears, “I’m very sorry.”

The rare silence still reigned absolute in the room, and he couldn’t bear another second of it. Without waiting to see when or how it would be broken, Victor strode towards the front door and out of the restaurant in less than ten steps.

Less than ten steps was all it took for him to be out of Yu-topia — out of the Katsukis’ life, and Yuuri’s — forever.

* * *

**SUBTLE KNIFE, THE, PULLMAN, P.**

**DUE DATE:** January 27, 2020

"Here you are. Have a nice weekend," said Victor, handing the book to the boy. With a smile, the boy said "thanks!" and skipped away. Before the door of the library had even closed, he was already opening the book to its first page.

 _“Yeah, well, no wonder,”_ Victor thought, vaguely amused. The previous book in the series ended in quite the cliffhanger.

Another Friday regular off today’s list. Elderly Woman With The Really Long Braid had already taken _Cane Field of Passions_ and _Passion in the Desert_ for the weekend (and Victor loved every single one of her life choices); Ukrainian Man With The Eternally Runny Nose had taken Dumas’ _Les Quarante-cinq,_ and Weird Shoes-In-Hand Lady had already asked for _Confessions of a Shopaholic_ (and again left without it. Victor would likely go to his grave thinking about her).

And those, he thought, would probably be it. He doubted that Intimidating Japanese Woman With The Best Literary Taste (That Wasn’t Actually Hers) would be coming back.

Well, at least Yakov was, in a few days. And it seemed he was bringing with him the dawn of a reconciliation with Lilia, and the possibility she and cousin Yura would come back to the US in a couple of months. Before the trip, Victor had had zero faith in Yakov’s abilities to bring her back — but then again, he’d never understood what charms of his, exactly, had made her marry Yakov, so he’d always been out of his depth there.

Was it the jaw? Maybe it was the jaw.

Maybe he didn’t lie and pretend to be something he was not. Victor heard it worked wonders for relationships.

Throwing his head back with a sigh, he looked at the clock: 5:45 PM. Only 15 minutes more before he could close the library, drop somewhere for dinner — would it be too weird, or just regular weird if he went to Junior’s and cried over some cheesecake? — and head home for another night of long nothings.

Another night wishing he had the courage to send Yuuri a text.

A text saying what, exactly, was anybody’s guess.

 _“Thank you for not getting a restraining order against me”_ sounded about right.

The last couple of patrons left, but Victor didn’t get up from his chair; his eyes roamed around the empty library while his fingers mechanically turned the small porcelain ballerina on his desk — an old gift from Lilia — this way and that, in a dance that went nowhere. The only dance Victor had known his whole life. Meanwhile, Vicchan burned a whole in his pocket. Victor brought the tiny poodle to work every day, and every day he failed to dare prop him up on his computer, like he wanted to.

Ten more minutes till he had to go home. The well-earned reward of a long work day — and he hated it. Hated going back to the silence of the apartment, where the only thing he could hear was his own muffled steps, the coughing fits of Mrs. Rygalski next door, and the echoes of his mother’s laughter; hated that he didn’t need to turn his phone off or put it on silent mode before bed, because no one would call. Hated that all the no ones he’d ever had and all the smiles he’d always dreamed about had turned into one single name he would never be able to say again.

And it was what he deserved.

He gave the ballerina a short spin, and watched her fall on the desk with a faint, muted _clink._

“Yeah, you and me both, girl,” he mumbled.

Somewhere out there, there was a Victor who had a Yuuri in his arms right now — a Yuuri that loved him back — and no obligation to let go. A Victor surrounded by people that smiled when he arrived, and called him when he wasn’t there, a Victor that walked forward instead of straggling behind.

He could be that Victor. All he needed was a hand to hold on that path forward.

At the unmistakable thud of a book on the counter as someone cleared their throat, Victor raised his head.

“Hello, what can I—” he began and immediately stopped. On the counter, there was an old battered copy of _Anna Karenina._ Behind it, Yuuri.

Yuuri Katsuki, with his eyes of chestnut brown and his eternally disheveled hair.

“I know I said no more Russians,” he said, with a seriousness that contradicted the tiny smile dancing at the corner of his lips, “but as it turns out, I… haven’t had quite enough yet? So I was wondering…” and he cleared his throat again, while that familiar tide of pink spread to the tip of his ears, to the endless fascination of Victor’s heart. Yuuri tapped the book rhythmically (shave and a haircut, two bits) before finishing, “if I… could take this Russian home?”

With his heart thumping a storm in his ears — and were stomachs supposed to climb one’s throat like that? — Victor slowly shook his head.

“Sorry. I’m afraid you can’t.”

Yuuri’s face fell. “Oh. Um. Okay. I’m… I’m so—”

“Not without a library card,” Victor added with a wink.

The _glare_ he got in return. It would’ve petrified him in place, if it didn’t make Yuuri look so damn adorable. Victor stood up and leaned on the counter to look at him from up close, half-afraid he was hallucinating.

“I see,” Yuuri said drily, and this time it was only a microscopic twitch of his chin that indicated any effort in containing a smile. “So who do I talk to about that?”

“A librarian,” said Victor emphatically. He glanced at the clock: 6 PM. Abandoning his post, he went around the counter to meet Yuuri on the other side. “The librarian is always there for the community, Yuuri.”

They were standing less than a foot apart now, and Victor drank in every detail: the faint smell of coconut he’d already come to associate with Yuuri, the slight dampness of his hair, the fluffiness of his blue scarf. The pink blush that had come back upon Victor’s sudden proximity.

Yuuri hummed, eyes trained on Victor’s. “Is that so? And…” his hand came up to pick some lint off the arm of Victor’s sweater, lint Victor was pretty sure had never been there to begin with, “is the librarian busy right now? Is he seeing anyone?”

“Nope,” Victor replied, before Yuuri had even finished the word ‘anyone’. “No one. Nobody. Not busy at all. The librarian is all yours.”

The smile turned into a grin that Yuuri bit his lips to contain. “No partners, comatose or otherwise, I should know about?”

Victor pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yuuri, please.”

“Just checking,” said Yuuri, this time picking non-existent lint off Victor’s left shoulder. “Making sure I’m not taking anyone’s Russian home with me. Didn’t care much for that feeling, to be honest.”

“I’m sorry,” said Victor quietly.

“Meh,” Yuuri answered with a shrug. “We’ll talk. But like. You’re a _mess,_ you know that, right?”

He nodded. “Painfully aware, I assure you.”

“Good.” His fingers slid down from Victor’s shoulder to the frayed fringes of the old scarf around his neck; before Victor could register it, Yuuri’s hand wrapped itself around one of the ends of the fabric while he gently pulled Victor towards him until their lips were a mere couple of inches apart.

“Be my mess, then,” he whispered, sending a shiver that ran down Victor’s spine, curled in his toes, and robbed the air right out of his lungs. The blush, he realized, had disappeared, and been replaced with something else — something that didn’t hesitate or end its sentences with question marks. Something that was ready to wreak havoc on the rest of Victor’s days.

Victor wanted to drown in it till he was no longer able to breathe.

He tipped Yuuri’s chin up.

“Funny how you think I wasn’t before,” he whispered, and was rewarded with the hitch in Yuuri’s breath.

Tilting his head, the last coherent thought crossing his mind before he closed his eyes and leaned in was how perfectly Yuuri would fit against his chest when they— 

_Click._

They froze.

“Loop, _no,_ put that away right now, or so help me,” said a hushed voice.

Yuuri groaned.

Eyes still closed, Victor leaned his forehead against Yuuri’s with a chuckle.

“Yuuri, I love them all very much, but… please tell me you didn’t bring your family with you for this.”

A sigh. “I… really tried not to. But they promised they’d wait outside,” he said, raising his voice on that last part, clearly for the benefit of whoever was just outside the door.

Cocking his head, Victor looked at the entrance: nine heads poked out of the threshold and watched them.

“We are outside. Technically,” said Minako.

“You never said how far from the door we had to be,” Nishigori added.

“Let that be a lesson,” said Mari. “Now, are you gonna kiss my boyfriend or what?”

“He’s not!... Oh my god,” Yuuri hid his face in his hands. Victor waved at them with a small smile.

“Hi, everyone.”

“Hi, Victor!” said the triplets, waving back enthusiastically. One of them took a picture, and Yuuko took the phone from her hands.

“For the _last time—_ I’m sorry, you guys, I really thought they would behave.”

“Hi, Vicchan,” said Mrs. Katsuki, and Victor waved again, feeling his smile stretch from ear to ear this time.

“Hi, Mrs. Katsuki! Listen, I—”

“I know, my dear,” she said kindly. “But you can tell me all about it back at the inn. There’s dinner waiting.”

“She made katsudon for you, Vicchan,” Mr. Katsuki explained, “and she doesn’t make it for everyone.”

“You _have_ to eat her katsudon,” Yuuri whispered. “It’s life changing.”

“You’re not part of the family until you eat it,” Minako said with a wink, and not crying on hearing that was the hardest thing Victor had ever done. He barely managed it.

“And I made cheesecake, too,” Mrs. Katsuki added.

That sure helped rein in those tears. Victor and Yuuri exchanged a glance, and Victor bit back a laugh.

“Right,” said Victor. “Can’t wait.”

“Well, show’s over, everyone,” said Minako, shooing the triplets away and dragging Mari by the arm. “If we stay here, they’re never gonna do it, c’mon. We’ll see them outside.”

In a disarray of waves and “bye!” and “come on”, the Katsukis & co. hurried away, until the library door was once again unoccupied.

Victor took a deep breath. Okay. Time to go back to wh— 

Yuuri’s lips found his before he could finish his thought, and Victor answered on sheer instinct. His entire body melted against Yuuri — his lips, that were as soft as he’d dreamed and moved against his like a fever, his hands that wandered slowly around Victor’s back and waist, finally locking themselves around his neck to pull him closer. The way he tilted his head to let Victor in, and how Victor saw no reason to let go or come up for air ever again. He could finally lose himself in Yuuri — and maybe, who knew, find himself along the way.

When Yuuri slowly broke apart — leaving him with a final, small kiss that was almost bashful, compared to what they’d just shared — he sighed.

“I’ve, um… been wanting to do that for a little while.”

Victor twined their hands “I’ve wanted to do that since the moment you walked through that door.”

“So… for the last 10 minutes? That’s… flattering,” Yuuri said, raising an eyebrow.

“Yuuri, please. When you walked through the door on Christmas Eve,” Victor clarified, giving his hand a squeeze. And there it was, the blush that told Victor he’d nailed it again. Oh, he was going to enjoy doing that _a lot;_ as often as possible, and for as long as Yuuri allowed him to be around.

Yuuri answered with another squeeze as he delicately pulled him along through the glass doors, the small hall, out the old wooden doors and onto the main street. An itinerary Victor did every day, but that felt different this time. Not because of the path itself, but because of the faces and smiles that waited for him at the end of it, and the smile that walked by his side.

“Finally!” Mari said out loud, leaning against the Toyota. “Took you long enough to bring my boyfriend!”

Caught between trying to sigh and bite back a laugh at the same time, Victor snorted. He was never going to hear the end of that, would he?

One could only hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is! Thank you guys so much for your kudos and comments, I appreciate them all! If you haven't watched While You Were Sleeping, and are in need of a new, sweet couple with great chemistry, I can't recommend this movie enough!
> 
> Aya, I hope you've enjoyed your gift! I did my best bc you *deserve* the best. ♥♥♥
> 
> Thanks to [Rae](https://regardingluv.tumblr.com/), my faithful beta, who's following me even into places she doesn't quite go XD.
> 
> You guys can find me on [Tumblr](http://thehobbem.tumblr.com/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/thehobbem)!


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